Guest Author - Elsa Neal
You're in good company if you decide to go the self-publishing route. Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, amongst many others, self published at some point in their careers. But, as with anything that involves the dreams and hopes of others, the self publishing industry attracts its share of those who see a way to exploit the unwary.
If you look into self publishing, be honest with yourself about what you intend to do and why. There is a stigma attached to self publishing, and in trying to avoid this, authors can be enticed by certain schemes that couch the process in more attractive terms.
The best way to approach self publishing is as a business. Whether or not you're the author is somewhat irrelevant - your role in the process now is "publisher", and publishing is a balance of financial outlay versus return on investment.
Standard offset printing
Publishing using high quality offset printing is the most expensive upfront option and is not for the faint hearted. In many countries, this involves registering a business as a publisher and then hiring the professional skills necessary to produce your book in exactly the same way a commercial publisher would. This may include outsourcing your cover design, typesetting, editing, etc. You will generally be able to hire the same printer that other larger publishers use, and you will have to balance the overall cost of printing with the cost per copy, which decreases as the printing volume increases.
Other issues to take into account are storage and distribution services, and then your own marketing and promotion of your book.
Print on Demand technology
Print on Demand is a more financially viable option for most people and means that you don't print hundreds of copies that you have to store. See Print on Demand technology article.
Electronic publishing
Creating an e-book can be as simple as saving your book as a pdf document, or more complex, involving encryption and other security features. Many POD companies offer e-book publishing as an additional feature, giving your readers two options for purchasing your book. Electronic publishing is probably the least secure in terms of possible copyright infringement, because the material can be copied and pasted easily in all but the heavily encrypted and protected e-book formats.
Blog novels
Increasingly popular with the advent of blogging, is the Blog Novel or "Blook". Many authors already have a blog, and are comfortable publishing their novel on their blog or their website. This is not a secure way of publishing, because material published on the Internet is sometimes incorrectly seen as "Copyleft" or "Public Domain" material. However, the benefits of reaching a potentially unlimited readership base and developing a loyal fanbase are worth considering.
Make sure you're armed with all the self-publishing know-how with The Self-Publishing Manual : How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book by Dan Poynter
and The Fine Print of Self-Publishing : The Contracts & Services of 48 Major Self-Publishing Companies -- Analyzed, Ranked & Exposed by Mark Levine
