Being published is better than not being published.

You know those people who say "Publication doesn't matter" or some variant thereof? They're fucking liars.

People who say this include:

• Everyone who's ever been published.

Writing advice books looooove to reiterate this fact. Substitute "publication" with any form of success in any field, and you have similar results. Successful people like to downplay their success by pretending it's not all that great. They also like to pretend they've worked harder than everyone else, because of this insidious myth we cling to in America that hard work naturally and inevitably produces desirable results.

BULLFUCKINGSHIT.

You may have worked hard. You may be successful. And you may even know people who are lazy and poor, thus strengthening your bizarre insistence that hard work and success are somehow positively correlated. But those are not the only work/success combinations that exist, and I haven't seen much evidence that either style of working leads to a predictable outcome.

I think published people downplay the wondrousness of publication for a few reasons.

• Etiquette. It's bad manners in America to pretend you landed in your class because of circumstances as opposed to deservedness. Shit, it's bad manners to acknowledge the existence of class.
• False humility. "Sure, I'm published, but it's really not that big a deal. No, no, really, don't fawn over me." 
• False nostalgia. In this instance, the published have actually fooled themselves into thinking that things were better when they had to work at an $8/hour barista job so they could do their art in their spare time. They're convinced they've eaten from the fucking tree of knowledge and now that they know good and evil, boy, would they choose ignorant bliss, bub. It's kind of understandable. You get locked in patterns of stress and then once you achieve success, it's kind of hard to escape from those patterns, even though you don't have to stress so much anymore. You just channel the stress into weird new things. "Oh, the utter pressure to keep up with my former successes is damaging my complexion!"

BULL.FUCKING.SHIT.

Don't let these people lie to you. Until I have relationships ruined, I will stand by the controversial thesis I've always held:

Being published is preferable to not being published.

Here's why publication is better:

• You're published. This is the goal of every writer. If they say otherwise, it's because they forgot how horrible it was to be unpublished, unread, unloved.
• You're making money. Maybe. If you're not, you have cause to believe that people might want to pay you in the future. 
• You're much more likely to get published again. This is incentive to write, and we write because we love writing, right?
• People treat you differently. It's a verifiable fact. When I used to tell people I was a cook, they would get this look in their eyes like they were trying to think of something nice to say about my line of work. Then they would inch away in search of people with whom they could discuss their stock portfolio. When I tell people I'm a stay-at-home mom, they get this look of hate in their eyes and make snide comments about anti-feminists and how nice it must be to not have to do anything all day (these people have obviously never spent more than five minutes taking care of 3 kids, but whatever). But when I tell people I'm a writer (something I have only been drunk enough to pull off a few times), they look at me with reverence. They ask me questions. Advice questions. It's not like when I was a cook and people who weren't cooks would pretend to know how to cook better than me, because, you know, cooking is an idiot's profession (there are many idiots in cooking, true, but have you read some of the confessional blogs out there? Any idiot can write.)
• I would have broken the above bullet point into 2 paragraphs, but fucking Blogger wouldn't let me.

Point being, once publication occurs, life is all daisies and unicorns and spritely woodland creatures. Try it sometime.

P.S. People with a lot of blog traffic are happier than people without.