There's a lot of chatter going around the blogs on the perils of self-publishing. I lurk on other writer's blogs, I admit, and rarely comment. I can't help it. I'm a lurker by nature. My father lurked, my grandfather lurked, and so on. We have the lurky gene.
Anyway, the upshot of it all is simple. If you just send it somewhere to be printed, it's not a publishing credit. If someone (agent and/or editor) has assessed and approved it, then it's a publishing credit.
Self-publishing also means you don't get any help at all with proofreading, editing, or any form of error correction. To those who consider themselves above all that, consider this; that's probably why you're not getting accepted by traditional publishers. Nobody likes a smartass.
There's also the marketing to consider. You can spend all your time doing this yourself, or you can let a publisher's marketing department do it for you. They know how. It's what they do. While they're doing that, you can be writing another book.
I don't think any kind of self-publishing is worthwhile for fiction. There are many non-fiction instances where it can work: say you researched your family history and wanted it in a bound book. Who's going to buy it?
Suppose you want to do a photographic record of your local area. Who'd buy that?
If you wrote any kind of academic or specialist book, who'd buy it?
The market for those things is very small and often very local. You're not going to interest a New York publisher in a photo-collection of the cheery vagrants of Marchway, nor of the fascinating mutated and often carnivorous plant life of Dume Swamp. For the village residents, such a book would be invaluable, but even so the total expected sales wouldn't exceed 50 copies. So it'll never have the Random House of Penguins on the cover, that's for sure.
My sarcastic friend, Romulus, has self-published a small book on ghosthunting. It's very short, and likely to appeal only to a small group of readers. So he put it through Lulu. That makes sense. No publisher would look at it, because it'll never sell enough to pay them. Plus, he doesn't really care how many he sells. It's not his primary source of income, not by a long way.
One idea that was mooted, I forget where, was that a writer might want to get themselves a printed copy of their finished novel before they send it out for agents to reject. Even after acceptance, it takes a long time before the book appears on shelves. You might not want to wait that long to see what it looks like in print.
Well, you can do that through Lulu too. Just be sure never to make the book available to the public, or you've shot yourself in the foot. The best option would be to load it up, get as many copies as you want printed, then delete it (after the copies arrive). These are working copies only, you don't need to fool around with pretty covers. Don't buy too many: one to write on when you find the blunders you missed on screen, one to store away so you can remind yourself what it looked like before the agent/editor changed it all. That's all you need.
Lulu doesn't charge you to put books up. They only charge for the copies you buy. I can see where such an idea might be attractive, but beware - be absolutely sure the public don't get so much as a sniff, and be sure it's deleted before you send to agents. If they search on your name, or your title, and they find it on Lulu, they'll be reaching for the form rejection in the next instant.
Also, don't pass your Lulu copies around. It won't be as good as the final print, and if you have a lot of friends who are interested in it, why would they buy it if they've read it? How much money you make depends on who buys your book, not who reads it.
If you're a writer, you're self-employed. Even if you have another, real-life job, your writing counts as self-employment the moment you try to sell any. Just ask the taxman. It's your job. You should be paid for it, you shouldn't be giving your work away for free.
Most of all, you should never pay anyone anything in your quest to be published. Never. How would you react if, in your day-job, your boss demanded you pay for permission to come to work?
If anyone asks you to pay them to let you write for them, react the same way.
