by Michael Greaney

Created on: March 01, 2010

Your goals as a writer determine how you publish your message.  If your goal is a limited audience composed of friends and relations, the annual Christmas newsletter many people send out each year may be ideal.  For others a regular "snail mail" correspondence on a one-to-one basis meets the writer's (and the reader's) needs, and has resulted in some of the classics of literature, such as Cicero's letters to Atticus, or Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son.  (Of course, letters can backfire when published: Samuel Johnson castigated Chesterfield's letters as teaching "the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing master," so epistolary artists beware!)

For serious writers (as if there was ever any writer who is not "serious"), however, the question is how best to get The Great American (or English, Australian, Luxembourger, etc.) Novel into print.  This requires a little introspection and a great deal of honesty and objectivity.

Is your goal to make a lot of money?  Don't quit your day job.  Are you seeking fame as well as vast fortune?  Again, you're more likely to gain both fame and fortune doing what you do best, and not try to do so by writing.  Any writing done with those goals in mind is almost guaranteed to be second rate (although, not to keep dragging the Good Doctor into this, but you can't leave money out of the equation.  As he said, "Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.").

We assume then that your primary goal as a writer is to get a message across, and you've decided (or had it decided for you) that writing is the best way to do it.

That being the case, self-publishing is probably not for you.  This is not to say that self-publishing cannot be very effective in achieving certain goals, such as the satisfaction of having published a book, or having an attractive and effective tool to get your message across to a sharply defined and extremely limited audience.  An executive or owner of a company, for instance, might find that publishing an inspirational or motivational work for his or her employees could be very useful and (within that niche) be extremely successful in achieving the writer's goals.

A self published author, however, if he or she does not have a locked in audience or market, should be prepared to spend all, not just part of his or her time marketing the book, handling sales, promotion, and so on, so forth.  This leaves no time for writing anything else,

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