What is Self Publishing?

Self publishing is the act of publishing a book or other type of work by the author him/herself instead of through a publishing company. Most of the sales of the publishing industry do not come from self publishers. With the recent developments of the World Wide Web and blogging, self publishing has become much more prevalent.

Self publishing is different from regular publishing in that there is no traditional publisher. The creator of the book will assume the responsibilities of distributing the book, editing the book, marketing it, printing it, and binding it. Books may even be printed per order. Digital book printing, or e-books, are a much cheaper method of book publishing. Adobe and Apple have products that allow the self publishing of books digitally. If the book is published via traditional methods, there might be a lack of quality on the cover.

Most professionally published books have a high quality cover, but a self published book may not be able to afford the professional artists that are hired by big time publishing companies. Self publishers might have difficulty getting their books to mainstream retail outlets. Bookstores will usually not deal with smaller publishing companies because of the hassle. Rather they will buy many books from the larger companies to save time. This creates a problem for self publishers who want to get into the larger bookstores.

A person, or educational institution such as the Maui Community College, may have to resort to self publishing if they can not find a publishing company to take on their book. A publishing company must be able to guarantee to sell thousands of copies of the book at interest. They are not confident in every book, and thus the author might have to go to self publishing as a workaround.

There are new websites springing up that are making it easier and easier for amateur authors to get involved in self publishing with little to no financial risk. Lulu.com is a new free website that allows artists and authors to publish their work in a wide variety of formats. Many more websites like Lulu.com are springing up around the internet. Soon the phenomenon of self publishing will take the internet by storm as more authors find the benefits of self publishing to outweigh the disadvantages. When there is little to no financial risk, self publishing may make perfect sense for an author who isn't necessarily looking to dominate the New York Times Bestseller list, but still would like to sell to a wide variety of people throughout the world.