: Re: How to self-publish? I couldn't find anything to do with self-publishing. Could someone explain this to me and how I could do it? I know that I should know about this but I sadly don't.

@Moriarity138

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A general piece of advice, from experience: Don't self-publish unless you are willing and able to do all the publicity and sales for your book yourself. If you are a wonderful self-promoter, you can do well self-publishing. Otherwise it's a recipe for disappointment.

There are several routes to self-publishing, each with advantages and disadvantages:

Electronic: Advantages - low cost, more of a level playing field, large potential audience. Disadvantages - overcrowded field, easy to get lost among the competition, less prestigious (reputation as the refuge of amateurs), no physical object. Amazon is a top player in this market, they have resources to get beginners started.
POD (print on demand): Advantages - produces physical books, you pay only per copy (very low up front costs). Disadvantages - Very high cost per book as compared to traditional printing, making it almost impossible to place the book in bookstores. Also shares many of the disadvantages (low prestige, too much competition) of electronic publishing. Amazon and Lulu are two of the big names in POD.
Traditional Self Publishing: Advantages - Low cost per book, resulting in very high profits if you sell out your run of books. Cost per book low enough to be able to make a profit off bookstore sales. Disadvantages - High up-front costs, impractical for print runs of less than about 3000.
Vanity Publishing: Advantages - none. Disadvantages - High up-front costs with little hope of eventual profits.

The basic issue with self-publishing is that you have to do everything yourself --write the book, edit it, format it for publishing, arrange cover art (and illustrations if any), print it, distribute it and market it. This is a lot of work, and very few people can do all these different jobs well.

There are a lot of services that can help with those tasks, but the vast majority of them are over-priced rip-offs that take advantage of people who want to be authors. Accordingly, most self-published books are either amateurishly produced by do-it-yourselfers, or professionally produced at a nightmarishly high cost by a vanity service.

If you're determined to self-publish, I'd recommend starting with a combination of electronic and POD. A correctly formatted PDF will work for both formats, and neither has up-front costs if you are working through a reputable distributor/printer. If you become a success that way, you can always upgrade to traditional self-publishing once you have an established audience.

My single best piece of advice for you? Start a blog, and serialize the books you've already completed (publish a little bit each week online). Once you build up a fan base, you can use that as a way to convince a publisher to take a chance on your next book

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