Some advice for authors on self-publishing and ebooks — from teleread.com
and
New vanity publishing? — from publishingguru.blogspot.com
It’s a pretty good system for everyone involved in the making of a best-seller. Efficiency, ease of promotion, a pre-determined outcome, and everyone gets paid, even though about half of those hardcovers will eventually be composted, too. If you can publish a best-seller, you’d be crazy to publish anything else.
If you are at the bottom end of the mid-list scale, you’d be crazy to give your book license away at current industry standards. Let’s examine the three publisher advantages in light of the modern digital/print-on-demand landscape.