If you’ve ever dreamed of seeing your work in print – your unpublished novel, poetry, cartoons, photographs, or a catalogue of your paintings – here’s news, both good and bad, but mostly good, based on recent experience.

I wanted to publish a memoir about the first year my husband and I, two greenhorn city types, spent living off the grid in a Hawaiian mountain rainforest. With three chapters and an outline written, I felt I had some funny yet informative stories to tell.

I sent query letters to two "green" publishers, asking if they’d read a proposal. One of them not only read but sent a two-page e-mail rave review. He thought I needed a bigger publisher to do the book justice – encouraging, but still a rejection.

I’ve been this route before and didn’t really want to go there again – the waiting, the gentle turndown, the new query letter to a new publisher.. I began to think about self-publishing. With our off-grid Do It Yourself lifestyle, I’d learned so many new things. If I could now tend to the needs of our solar electric system, re-program the computer when my wireless internet went South, meanwhile splitting kindling for the woodstove, and helping repair our country road, how hard could it be to publish a book? I decided to go for it.

Self-publishing used to be expensive. Authors with a garage full of tomes they created, bulk-ordered, and couldn’t sell, will attest to that. Ten thousand dollars was not a lot to spend for a first printing of a few thousand books. But all that has changed. There’s been a revolution in publishing known as "on-demand digital printing."

With on-demand printing, one book – that’s right ONE book! - can be printed at any time, just for the person, anywhere in the world, who wants it. Is that amazing? There will be no left-overs (save a tree). Nor will a book go out of print. And uploading text and graphics to an on-demand publisher’s website is free.

I said "free" but I didn’t say "easy." I had to read and re-read many a website page before I could even begin to understand instructions for publishing a book to be made available to the public (as opposed to a private one that’s only for the author or a limited number of viewers). I had to create a 6" X 9" trade paperback book, perfect-bound (which means it has a spine), with specific page margins, text fonts, and page numbering. Establishing this format early on was helpful as I finished writing the book. I could see how long a chapter ought to be, and whether an important sentence was chopped in half by a page break.

"Free" went out the window, though, when my Mac word-processing program wouldn’t shake hands with a page-making template provided by my chosen manufacturer. I had to buy software, incurring my first cost, about $200.00, then learn how to use the new tools – picture headscratching and the occasional Anglo-Saxon expletive.

Even then, being off the grid, using a cellphone as a somewhat pokey connection to the internet, I needed the help of a computer professional with a PC, a land line, and DSL to successfully upload my files to the manufacturer’s website. Luckily, I knew the perfect person, a friend and graphic designer who’d already been the midwife of a print-on-demand book.. She could also design the cover. Her expertise and support were a boon. Like me, she was not at the beach, nor in her garden growing green beans, but stuck in front of a computer trying to coax it to do what she wanted. While I was having fits over text flow and spacing, she was having them over the size of my ISBN bar code. I paid an hourly rate for her work which totaled about $1,000.00 – beyond worth it.

Before the book was ready for people, I made plenty of mistakes: it wasn’t just technical issues, there were errors in punctuation and consistency. Without an editor, I had to muddle through. But, finally, the day came to see it in print. As strongly suggested by the manufacturer, I only ordered one copy, then haunted the post office waiting for its arrival.

Oh, the feeling of seeing your beautiful book for the first time! The cover’s cute! The introductory pages are fun! BUT . . . Ohhh no! Every chapter begins with Page 143! How the heck did that happen? And how on earth do I fix it?

I revised and printed three test books before the knots in my stomach were gone. Then, with no more glaring goofs, I bought a distribution package, approved the book, and it was suddenly, miraculously, widely available, in print and as a download.

The distribution package from my manufacturer cost a mere $100.00 (more if you want extra services). It includes a "storefront" on their website and listings with various wholesalers and retailers. My only other costs have been $25.00 for barcode creation and $30.00 for a Library of Congress control number. Plus the cost of books I’ve ordered - recently, six used for promotion.

If I buy copies, I pay the rock bottom price which is based on a book’s size, number of pages, quality of paper, etc. But it’s not my object to buy them or sell them myself. I want the book to be sold by others. Therefore, I kept it in an affordable retail price-range, under $20.00, by keeping the page-count low, and so far, it’s been selling at the rate of one or two books a day.

Promotion of my print-on-demand book is, once again, Do It Yourself. The New York Review of Books won’t review it, and most book-prize givers won’t consider it. But in these wonderful internet days, there are so many ways to let people know it’s out there. It can be previewed and peer-reviewed on-line at my "storefront," which is easily found by typing the book’s title into the search space on the manufacturer’s website.

Okay, having read this article, if you still long to see your work in print; and if you regard your computer as a friend, not a filthy traitorous enemy; and if you have patience with yourself while flailing around in the unknown, then self-publishing a print-on-demand book is an option I recommend. Nothing tops the feeling of holding your own book in your own hands, except, perhaps, feedback from readers enthusing, "I couldn’t put it down!"