Hi arikdiver! For what it's worth, my partner and I have both been writers most of our lives (I've only had 1 book published but usually write articles, while he's had 8 books pubished, was an editor with a major publishing company for years, and taught thee Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing, so we were both very much against self-publishing. Our mind-set was "yikes, anyone can publish a book now, literacy is going to hell in a handbasket!" But over the last few years, we've begun to see the value in it, particularly as we see that readers are setting the standard through reviews and are being very critical of poor writing. The major benefits we see are: 1. A book published by a publisher can take anything up to a year to reach the shelves, and once there, is available to a limited number of people (usually Australia only for us Aussies) and for a limited time. After a certain time (usually 3 months) if it's not reprinted then it's removed and usually remaindered, while an ebook is available to the entire world and for as long as you leave it up, and you can update it, add to it, correct it, re-write parts of it at any time! 2. The royalties on both ebooks and professionally published books are almost identical, even if it doesn't seem that way. i.e. royalty on a published book is 10% of wholesale price, which for $29.99 is usually about $1.50 per book, while Amazon's 70% royalty on an ebook priced at $2.99 is ... $2.09. And 3. while the publisher is supposed to distribute and promote your book, sad to say it rarely happens to the writer's satisfaction. My book was published by Penguin and I had lots of ideas of where it should be available for best sales, but most people I knew who were looking for it never found it, and Penguin never promoted it. With ebooks, you and you alone are responsible for promoting your book, through blogging, website, email, newsletter, facebook, twitter, etc. The fourth reason is that, sad to say, book sales have been declining rapidly since 2008. We've had an online bookshop for 16 years and today our sales are less than 30% of what they were in 2007. We've even tried giving books away to charity shops, but they refuse them because they have a store-room full of books no-one wants, and their prices are $1 each! I know some bookshops who have had to burn all their stock because they can't get rid of them. Just a few things you might want to think about while you're deciding which way to go.