Alyssa Goodnight are you out there? Alyssa is my hero. She self-published her first novel and got it into the hands of a ton of booksellers, got it reviewed by all kinds of top notch reviewers (BOOKLIST, who called her “irresistable”).

Other regular blog readers, such as Jaci Burton, began in epublishing with the highly respectable outfit Ellora’s Cave; when EC branched out into print, Jaci was right at the forefront, and now she and I share an agent and a publisher. (Jaci, the little slu– er, writing machine –is also with Berkley).

As for the success of certain POD books, there’s always the story of Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles, and a dozen other dreams-come true detailed on the blog POD-y Mouth.

Other POD published authors feel free to weigh in here. Natalie? Cindy? I don’t know what’s natalie said officially on the topic, but if you go to Cindy’s website, she has a great article up there on her own path through several e and POD publishers nad now with the (great) independent press, Red Sage.

For small presses, there are a ton of highly respectable ones.

But I don’t think I know enought o be able to make a list of Dos and Donts if you want to go that route with your novel. I never had an interest in that — was pretty firmly set on selling to a big print publisher.

Here’s the slim sum total of my thoughts on the matter:

I think POD or self-publishing, especially of a novel, should be a last resort. You’ve tried all the conventional means of getting your book on teh shelf — gone through agents, and all publishers, big and small — and you really think that this story needs to be out there. And you need to research the heck out of it and figure out how to do it right, and you need to devote yourself to making as big a splash with it as possible, which is going to take a lot of time, a lot of effort, and probably a good amount of money.

For most epublishers and super-small presses, you’re probably best off if you are writing in some sort of niche market where the audience KNOWS to come to that publisher for that kind of book. Urban fiction is often self-pubbed, erotic fiction was until recently often pubbed by dedicated publishers such as Ellora’s Cave, homosexual romance and erotica is very commonly published by smaller presses devoted to that type of fiction. I tend to see that the people who are doing best in independent or electronic markets are offering something that the bigger publishers aren’t. But that’s just what I’ve observed, and it’s a generalization.

The problem with being POD or self-published, as POD-y Mouth often states, is that there’s a ton of crap out there, and it’s a type of crap that you don’t usually see in conventionally published books. Then, what’s left has the same ratio of normal crap-to-good-books that you see in the mainstream. (her motto is “finding needles, discarding hay.”) So first you have to convince them you’re not crap. I hear it’s an uphill battle.

But I’m not an expert. I’m sure someone else here knows a lot more about it than me, having actually self published or epublished or published with a small press… anyone?

Have you blogged yet about vanity presses? They can be pretty scary, too. And what about the ebook market – is that at all useful for the would-be published writer?

At one time, ipublish.com looked like a possible alternative to mainstream publishing, but I think it was bought out (by a mainstream publisher) and closed down. Are there *any* non-mainstream possibilities that are not scams or rip-offs?