Interesting story, and hate to be the negative nancy here, but sad thing is, the "success" of self-publishing author Rod Hosington she mentions is a poorly crafted deception -- and before you say it, I know the point of the article wasn't entirely about sales potential of self-published authors.
I did the same thing as her, jumped onto Amazon and checked the bestsellers in the 'Mystery/Thriller/Suspense' section, the same one as her. Rod Hosington was nowhere to be seen, didn't even make it into the top 100. In fact, after searching him up, all of his books are abysmally low on the charts, with the exception of one book, his most popular ones ranked around 180,000th, some much, much lower. I'm aware that the article was published nearly 2 weeks ago, but I'm sure things couldn't have changed that much in such a short time?
Confused about the difference in what she claimed to what I saw, I searched up the particular book she mentioned and noticed it wasn't outselling anybody, it was being given away for free and currently ranked 2,000th on the free list and 13th in Mystery series, and 35th on the mystery subgenre list. I can imagine if people had to actually pay for it, that it would be ranked much the same as his other books.
None of this is to say that self-publishing can't work though, as we know there are very successful self-published authors out there, but just looking at the top 100 paid bestsellers on Amazon shows, it's still traditionally published that dominate it and I suspect that's because self-published authors cannot compete with the marketing contacts and funds that publishers have.
I guess in the end we have to decide for ourselves just what we consider to be a success... The author of the article certainly isn't hitting any top charts on Amazon that I can see, but she seems happy with the results of her efforts.
I suppose as long as we are happy that's all that matters, right?
Moving on from that and onto the point of the article... sure, this Rod Hosington probably does have a good attitude towards his fellow writers and wants to help others out, but there are known traditionally published authors on this forum that we all know are quite willing to help others out, so perhaps it's just the particular person she targeted?
Perhaps it's more because self published authors have more time to spare? With all the book signings and tours and seminar events traditionally published authors are made to do, I can understand that they don't have much time to spare. It's also very possible that Coben doesn't check that email account she contacted, or her email got caught in the spam filter. There are many reasons, yet for the sake of justifying her point she made the assumption that he just didn't want to help her.
I've personally talked with traditionally published NZ authors over here and mentioned my own progress in writing a novel and they were very excited and encouraging, thinking it was great that I too was working towards becoming an author.
I don't agree one bit with her black and white comparison of traditional to self-published attitudes.