An analog of this set of imperatives, for me, is my experience as an author of rpg supplements. I've been fairly successful in my work for Steve Jackson Games, both in sales and in critical reception. In theory, I could self-publish, if I came up with a system of my own. But in point of fact, that would require me to do all sorts of things that I'm not skilled at: identifying a suitable target market for a book, doing page layout, selecting and buying art, possibly contracting for printing and binding, negotiating distribution, and the general overhead of business management and raising capital. At best doing all this would sharply cut into the time I could spend writing; at worst I would fail at it and deplete my financial resources. It's well worth it to me to freelance for an established publisher that can do all of the heavy lifting. I probably make substantially more than I would if I did that stuff myself, and I certainly have less uncongenial work and less anxiety.
In the old-fashioned academic publishing world, which I have worked in for decades now, copy editing is a skilled task that is paid at a moderately high hourly rate. Any entity, profit or nonprofit, that offers copy editing on a scale more massive than can be handled by a journal managing editor in their spare time is going to have to pay for someone like me. The substitutes are not impressive: non-native English speaking "copy editors," spell checkers, authors using their own judgment. I expect that similar issues arise for indexing, abstracting, page layout, Web design, and the like. Donald Knuth tried to eliminate all this in mathematics and computer science by writing TeX, which was meant to enable every author to do their own page layout without having nasty publishers get involved . . . but he wasn't able to write software to give mathematicians the ability to write a coherent sentence, or use fonts intelligently, or create a printed page that was easy and comfortable to read (though some can, as Dr. Knuth illustrates). As a result, my computer now has software designed for editing TeX articles for a journal that gets most of its submissions in this form; it brings me in added income. Someone has to pay for my services.
no subject
In the old-fashioned academic publishing world, which I have worked in for decades now, copy editing is a skilled task that is paid at a moderately high hourly rate. Any entity, profit or nonprofit, that offers copy editing on a scale more massive than can be handled by a journal managing editor in their spare time is going to have to pay for someone like me. The substitutes are not impressive: non-native English speaking "copy editors," spell checkers, authors using their own judgment. I expect that similar issues arise for indexing, abstracting, page layout, Web design, and the like. Donald Knuth tried to eliminate all this in mathematics and computer science by writing TeX, which was meant to enable every author to do their own page layout without having nasty publishers get involved . . . but he wasn't able to write software to give mathematicians the ability to write a coherent sentence, or use fonts intelligently, or create a printed page that was easy and comfortable to read (though some can, as Dr. Knuth illustrates). As a result, my computer now has software designed for editing TeX articles for a journal that gets most of its submissions in this form; it brings me in added income. Someone has to pay for my services.