When should you self-publish?

I'm such a strong believer in self-publishing that my answer to this is: Always.

Okay, let me back up for one second . . . .

IF you have a huge following of fans, your own TV or radio show, regular speaking engagements in front of thousands of people, a newspaper column, a website that generates hundreds of thousands or, better yet, millions of hits, then, by all means, go forth to the Promised Land of mainstream publishing, for you are a Most Favored One.

Barring that, I say, print 2500 to 5000 copies of your book, making sure it's well-written, of course, and also well-designed inside and out, with great cover blurbs. Sell every last copy. Hire a publicist and get noticed. THEN let a literary agent go pester an editor at one of the publishing houses to pick up your book. This, in fact, happens all the time, y'all.

Pssst - Here's the little secret that's no longer a secret ---The publishing business is actually a business, miniscule profit margins and all.

Yes, those in the publishing business are not in it for the money the way someone might be in, say, financial fields. People in publishing love books, but that doesn't mean they have to love yours, no matter how well-done and original. "What's the author's platform?" they ask. (Hark - "Platform" does not mean talent, though that may be cold comfort to you; it means an established fanbase.) They understandably want to know how the author will attract book buyers. If your answer is not crystal-clear, their answer is, "Next!"

Birthing a bestseller does happen --- and people do win the lottery. The odds are about the same. Self-published books, from What Color Is Your Parachute? to The Prayer of Jabez, have sold in the multimillions from the get-go, but they are the exception, truly. Still, when you self-publish, you control your own destiny, and I love that for my authors. So, what next? With print on demand and all the other professional services a mouse click away at sites like iUniverse.com, parapublishing.com, cafepress.com, lulu.com, and more (be careful, though’Äîsome are infinitely better than others), you can now birth your book faster, more inexpensively, and with more professional-looking results than ever before.

Most of the self-published books I personally work on are meant to be effective marketing tools that will be used to help brand and grow a business by showing the author's expertise.

In the realm of fiction, however, here's a list of just some of the writers over the ages who have chosen to self-publish:

Margaret Atwood, L. Frank Baum, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Whew, what an exhaustive list of celebrated authors! And all true!

Self-publishing is an excellent way to test the market for a book, establish the market, and even build the market to such an extent that an author can sell the reprint rights to a much larger publisher for a good advance. And, in fact, any larger publishers now look online, and offline, for self-published books that could fit their publishing program. Self-publishing has become respectable again. Publishers Weekly will even cover self-published books, which was unheard of a few short years ago.

Okay, here's the downside of not being published by a mainstream publisher --- you are not going to get on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. So what! Very few people pick a book off the shelf. They usually have to walk into the bookstore looking for it. So, again, the marketing of your book falls back on your side of the fence. The publisher's overworked public relations person has 20 other books to push; if yours doesn't' fly off the bookstore shelves in the first couple of weeks, it's "Adios, muchacho!" You'd also be better off with a book you sell where you keep 100% of the net profits, not 10%.

The right time to get your book out, from conception to completion, though, is, to me, the most significant factor in all this. By the time people come to my door for help in writing their book, they want it out now, baby -- three months, four months, tops. Go mainstream, and you will be "pregnant" with that book for a year and a half to two years. It's a fact of life... the process is a slow one.

Here's the rub: A self-published book calls for deep pockets, or an author who is a consummate self-promoter. Hey! Picasso was a self-promoter! He was always buttonholing people to come see (and buy) his paintings. If it was good enough for him, and for the famous writers listed above, why not for you? Don't you believe in your own book?

Meantime, I leave you with this sage observation from Judith Applebaum, author of How to Get Happily Published. She says, "Getting the book produced is easy. Getting the word to readers is the hard part." Amen.

Next week: The role of marketing and public relations in getting a book to readers.