“Do you have any new books coming out?”

People sometimes ask me that, and the question always gets me to thinking: Should I write another book? I know the effort that goes into producing one, and I know that creating Walking my Dog Jane was the most fun I’ve ever had writing. And I also felt exposed and vulnerable while writing it, and after putting the finished product out there.

Yes, I do think of writing other books, but I get stuck when I remember the publishing experience I had.

I hired my own editors—Dan Joling for the tough love (I hated him for two days after getting a chapter back, then realized his critique was spot-on), and Jennifer Brice for the more ego-friendly meetings at the coffee shop. Then I wrote a proposal, found a publisher, and the publisher put my book in circulation.

When I handed it over to the publisher, way off in the middle of a Catholic college in Pittsburgh, I also lost a lot of control over the baby that was born in my brain and tapped out on a MacIntosh Classic II in a small cabin. The publisher chose the title for the book, chose the cover, and had very little editorial feedback for me because I gave them such a clean product. They put out a few hardback editions, and then went to paperback.

Another publisher bought the rights to the book and made a great new cover (using the same photo of my dog’s face that I proposed with my manuscript years before), and the book sold well for them. And then they went bankrupt, and the $1.18 I saw for every $16.95 paperback stopped coming in the mail.

I won’t play the whiny writer here, ‘cause you don’t want to hear it. Instead, I’m intrigued by what seem to be new developments in the self-publishing world. I’d like to know what you think.

Amazon.com has a few new self-publishing services for people with manuscripts. Part of the deal is that after you give them a PDF file of your stuff, and a cover you’ve made, they’ll post the book on Amazon and will only print it when someone orders it. The print-on-demand feature eliminates the need for a writer to have a shed full of books and do all hustling him/herself. That also seems to negate one of the biggest advantages a writer gets from a conventional publishing house—that they will take your book from a Word document to a book, print it, and see that it gets distributed.

For a small-time author like me, self-publishing is an intriguing way to go. And doing the math from what Amazon proposes, I can get more than twice the money for my effort than the cut I was getting from the conventional publishers. Or so it seems. I haven’t taken the plunge yet.

Do you have any ideas on self-publishing? Lemme know.