These notes on self-publication refer particularly to on-line publishing with Lulu.com. They have comprehensive help facilities which you should study carefully. Here are some of the things that they did not tell me.

Self-publishing is essentially self-printing. There remain all the problems of selling the book. Friends and relatives may buy, distributors may list, but who else knows or cares?

Printing on demand is expensive. The price you can offer to the public may be prohibitive, and you may make a loss on sales by conventional bookshops, which take up to 60% of the cover price for themselves.

Some on-line distributors such as the bookdepository manage to offer cut-prices and free postage. It may even be cheaper to buy your own copies from them.

To be listed by distributors and stocked by bookshops, your title has to have a ISBN number and barcode. You can do this yourself, but it makes more sense to buy a distribution package from Lulu.

Once you have applied an ISBN to a title, any revision is treated by Lulu as a new project and requires a new ISBN. This is expensive.

The distribution package gets you listings on Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc. The publicity that leads to sales is up to you.

Downloadable pdf e-book format is virtually free from Lulu, but if you do it as part of the same project as your paperback the file will have no security restrictions. The only way to get restrictions on printing, for example, is to make the e-book a separate Lulu project.

You can obviously offer an e-book at a very low price, but the same problems of publicity arise as with paperbacks. The problem of distribution is greater, because there is no distribution package and e-book distributors charge for listings with no publicity for your title.

Until you buy a distribution package, the Lulu publishing process is free (apart from the cost of printing) and you can revise your project as many times as you want. You are encouraged to order (and pay for) paper copies to check critical revisions. If you do not take a final copy before choosing whether to be published by Lulu or by yourself, you will in fact only be offered "published by Lulu."

If you care about the look of your work, you will end up doing a large number of revisions, each requiring changes to the file used to print the book. Lulu insist upon genuine Adobe pdf files, or to be paid for creating them from your Word files. I think that it is worth buying the Adobe Acrobat software that contains the Distiller to create your own pdf files. This is NOT the free Reader.

Lulu are producing their own book about using their site. Look out for it.