Self publishing means that a book or other publication is published by the author or authors of the piece instead of being published by a large third party publishing house. Though self publishing represents only a small portion of the publishing industry in terms of sales, it has been an important facet of publishing throughout history.

The innovation of desktop publishing, advances in publishing technology and print on demand features on the internet have increased interest in self publishing. Other current features of online society have also contributed to the rise in self publishing, such as blogging, the cultural phenomenon of the do it yourself sub-culture and the wide spread proliferation of various media channels.

There are a number of motives that make self publishing the best solution. With self publishing you dont have to worry about being approved by a publishing company. In addition, self publishers can opt for money saving techniques with the cutting and binding processes. Author-publishers that are much more focused on the content than the package and wish to emphasize this often opt for short-run and low cost publishing techniques.

One of the reasons that self publishers often end up seeking publishing through a third party publisher is that to often book stores will not carry books that look to dissimilar to the shiny and perfect big publisher books. In an attempt to create books of that level production costs quickly rise, as the only machines that can create these quality pieces are much more expensive, and it becomes more expensive to self-publish at that level than to get picked up by a publishing company.

Other applications in which self publishing is most appropriate is in the event that a popular topic which is only of interest in a select geographic region is written about. In this scenario it seems that self publishing is perfectly suited for the short run and limited distribution of such a regional publication.

Sometimes it is content of a highly controversial nature that is self published because the author or authors dont even want to bother making their works acceptable for large publishing house publishing, or are turned down by publishing companies because of the controversial nature of the writing.

Take a look at the Self Publishing or Not? website for some more in depth exploration of the advantages, disadvantages and how-tos of self publishing.