Yesterday, I attended an all day seminar in Hyannis, MA, sponsored by the Cape Cod Writers Center. The morning presenters shared their knowledge and experience with preparing printed books or manuscripts for e-book publication. It’s much more involved than I would have ever thought. But first thing this morning, I reformatted my entire novel in WORD!
The afternoon speaker from Grub Street spoke about marketing and self-publishing. She sees the big-box publishers as unfair to authors and quickly becoming dinosaurs. There are many relatively-new services out there for the express purpose of helping authors prepare their manuscripts for either or both e-publishing and self-publishing. The expense is not as big as you would think and is becoming more attractive for authors all the time. The payback when your book sells is a bigger piece of the pie than you’d ever receive from a main-stream publisher.
Given my recent disappointment with an agent search, I find I’m leaning more and more toward self-publishing, with the sister offer of an e-book.The best words of advice? Read any contracts carefully and don’t box yourself in with only one distributor!
And so, I now need to master the art of marketing through the social networks!
Debi Graham-Leard 
Interesting article, informative and well-written. Keep us posted on what you find out.
We are having the same trouble finding the fine line between self promotion and hired promotion on the West Coast. Would be very interested at gleaning insight from your findings. Keep on posting, and I’ll keep on following your post.