Self-publication

Self-publishing is the publication of any book, album or other media by its author without the involvement of an established publisher. Unlike the traditional publishing model in which control of the publication is shared with a publisher, the author controls the entire process in a self-publishing effort including the design of the cover and the interior, price, distribution, marketing, and public relations. The authors can do all of these activities by themselves or they may outsource these tasks. Self-publishing is not limited to physical books, but includes pamphlets and brochures, as well as digital media such as e-books and websites. In traditional publishing, the publisher bears the costs, such as editing, marketing, and paying advances, and reaps a substantial share of the profits; in contrast, in self-publishing, the author bears all of these costs but earns a higher share of the profits. In common parlance, the term usually refers to written content in book or magazine form, in physical media such as paper or in electronic form, but in theory it could apply to the self-publishing of video content or zines or uploading of images to a website.

The self-publishing landscape has changed considerably in the past two decades with new technologies such as the Internet, and the $1 billion market continues to change at a rapid pace. Increasingly there are numerous alternatives to traditional publishing, and self-publishing is increasingly becoming the first choice for writers. With this growth in activity, the book world has become flooded with titles, much of it of low quality, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for self-publishers to differentiate one's offerings from the stew of average offerings. Most self-published books sell very few copies, although there are approximately a dozen books that sell into the millions. The quality of self-published works varies considerably.

Self-publishing is not a new phenomenon but has been around since the invention of writing. After the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, numerous books have been self-published. In 1759, British satirist Laurence Sterne's self-published the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. While most novels were distributed by established publishers, there have been authors who chose to self-publish, or who chose to start their own presses, such as John Locke, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Luther, Marcel Proust, Derek Walcott, and Walt Whitman. In 1908, Ezra Pound sold A Lume Spento for six pence each.Franklin Hiram King's book Farmers of Forty Centuries was self-published in 1911, and was subsequently published commercially. In 1931 the author of The Joy of Cooking paid a local printing company to print 3000 copies; the Bobbs-Merrill Company acquired the rights, and since then the book has sold over 18 million copies. In 1941, writer Virginia Woolf chose to self-publish her final novel Between the Acts on her Hogarth Press, in effect starting her own press.

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