It's a tough trade off for certain. Particularly for the writer themselves. Sometimes rejection from knowledgable individuals (got one of those today in fact) can lead you to make improvements to a story before the general public gets to see it.
I personally plan on the three tries approach:
1) Give product to publisher
2) If rejected, evaluate response.
3) Improve story based on response if point is solid (hopefully there is a reason provided).
4) Give product to another publisher
5) Repeats steps 2 to 4
6) At this point, if you still think you have a winner, it might be best to self publish. If you were willing to go through the efforts to improve what you have, it's certainly better then what you would have had without any feed back at all.
It's a tough trade off for certain. Particularly for the writer themselves. Sometimes rejection from knowledgable individuals (got one of those today in fact) can lead you to make improvements to a story before the general public gets to see it.
I personally plan on the three tries approach:
1) Give product to publisher
2) If rejected, evaluate response.
3) Improve story based on response if point is solid (hopefully there is a reason provided).
4) Give product to another publisher
5) Repeats steps 2 to 4
6) At this point, if you still think you have a winner, it might be best to self publish. If you were willing to go through the efforts to improve what you have, it's certainly better then what you would have had without any feed back at all.