does self-publishing interest you?

I got published at lulu.com free. I don't have money and that was also my big problem until I accidentally saw the promo of lulu. I have published more than 10 poems at poetry.com I did not win in any contest but I was offered to buy a book where my poems are. I have been to writing.com but it's not for me because I'm very busy with my translation work. I am a Christian, a child of God, baptized into Christ on October 1, 1989 and I belong to the Church of Christ founded and headed by Christ as shown in Acts Chapter 2. I am given the gift of knowledge and understanding Bible Greek and I translate the Word of God from Greek to English PLAINLY - Greek word into its English equivalent with additional words for grammar purposes written in italics so that readers may delete them as the wish. I have already published THE WILL New Testament (Greek to English), GENESIS & EXODUS (Greek to English), ELEMENTS of SALVATION, The Right Way, GOD, ORIGIN, TRANSFER into PERFECTION, GREEK-ENGLISH (Grammar & Vocabulary), WORDS in THE WILL New Testament, and others shown at http://www.lulu.com/arseniajoaquin Try visiting lulu. It's free, no set up fees, no buyng required, and they extend a lot of help to those who do not yet know the how-to's.

There are two sides to this coin. On the first, self publishing gives you complete freedom over everything in your book and if you find a publisher, like Lulu, that gives you a storefront and the ability to sell through them, you keep a much larger portion of the profit. Even if they offer the opportunity to distribute the book through a larger bookseller like Amazon or iBookstore, which will take a cut, you still keep a larger portion than you would going through a major publisher. But you set the price for your book, you design the cover art and any press materials (or pay someone to do it according to your specifications), you control the layout... everything is completely yours. There are however some drawbacks to self publishing. First, while "going the indie route" is applauded in all other areas of art - music, film, visual art - being an indie author still carries a stigma that the only reason anyone would do that is because they aren't good enough to do things the traditional way. Even though many successful authors have shunned the major publishers ... authors like Anne Rice. And everyone KNOWS she's "good enough;" she just wanted more control. The second drawback is marketing is completely on your shoulders. BUT. The way the book publishing industry is set up, you are almost guaranteed that you will be doing you own marketing and promotion even with a major publisher. Used to be the majors had three groups of authors... their top sellers who basically sold themselves just because of their name (the publisher still marketed these books but really didn't need to... the strategy was "New novel from Stephen King" and the whole project was done, the book sells itself), the middle tier that was made up of authors who had proven they had something worth selling but needed more marketing and the bottom tier of newbies and nobodies. More recently, they have since essentially done away with that middle tier and now you are either a superstar or a marketing risk. Now you are either the guy who gets stand alone displays in stores or the guy who gets consigned to the stacks with everyone else where someone MIGHT stumble across your book and give it a shot. The only difference is being with a major gives you a higher probability of earning a spot on a shelf. But with brick and mortar stores going the way of the dodo, you're really not missing out on a lot of sales as long as you can get on Amazon. So... if I'm going to have to do all the work, I might as well keep all the control as well.