Self-publishing can most of the times turn out to be a good idea. You can control your content and even end up gaining more money through this service than if you would choose a prestigious publishing house. Used wisely can get you on a win line. In order to reach that goal that you have set for yourself, you should know some helpful things about self-publishing that editor David Carnoy provided in one of his articles.

First of all, you should be very careful when choosing your book price. When you are self-publishing, price can be a real problem. You can't set your price too high, in order to actually sell the book you wrote, but you can't sell it too short either, because you have to think about the commissions you will pay to the host website (Lulu, CreateSpace, and so on), the number of pages (if its over 250 pages, you should ask somewhere over $11), and many others. Try to think of all the expenses you had and the ones that are yet to come, and come up with a price that will cover those and get you a profit as well.

You should be the advocate of your work. Fight for your book to get it up in the tops and keep it there. In order to reach success with your book, you should never let your guard down. You need the stomach and the time for constantly promoting your book. "What's the secret to marketing your book successfully? Well, the first thing I advise -- and I'm not alone here -- is to come up with a marketing plan well before you publish your book. The plan should have at least five avenues for you to pursue because chances are you're going to strike out on a couple of lines of attack. It's easy to get discouraged, so you have to be ready to move on to plan c, d, and e (and the rest of the alphabet) pretty quickly" says Carnoy.

Prepare some pitches for the blogs that will be interested into publishing an interview regarding you and your book. Spend money wisely to promote yourself. You can do it through Facebook ads, Google AdWords/Keywords, AuthorBuzz and many others.

When trying to sell your book, there are two main things that you should pay attention to: reviews (any publisher wants to get great reviews for their books, as everybody knows that reviews help sell more books, and therefore gain more profit. "Reputable book reviewers such as Kirkus and more recently Publishers Weekly are offering special reviews services geared toward self-published authors", says Carnoy.

You should however prepare yourself, as the review could come out as a negative one which will make you lose some readers. Just the fact that you are paying for reviews it doesn't mean that it will be a positive one) and your Amazon page ("you need to have your Amazon page look as good as possible and take advantage of the tools Amazon has to help you surface your book -"Tags," Listmania, reader reviews, etc.

It may not have a major impact, but it's better than doing nothing", advices David. Your Amazon page will help you sell your book, so you need to take care of it and make it attractive to people).

Just because your book got out and you started making some profit, you shouldn't lay down and think that your work is done.

"Self-publishing is a rapidly evolving industry with lots of competitors that are constantly throwing out new information. Publishers are continually upgrading their facilities, infrastructure, and pricing, and what I -- or other pundits say today -- could be wrong just a few months from now", says editor David Carnoy.

So, you should always stay on top of your game and be prepared to make the necessary changes to keep your book in the first places and bring you profit.