I've been meaning to answer this question for awhile. Despite having done a fair amount of zine and newsletter publishing, I never even thought about self-publishing a book until I ran across the Mofo site. It just never dawned on me. When I did start to think about it, my hang up was sales. I'm probably the world's worse sales person. I determined I was willing to lose the money invested in self publishing if the book didn't sell because people didn't want it BUT I did not want to see the book fail to sell because I didn't have it in me to market it. For me personally, I think it's individual and gender related. I am not very good at nor very interested in "selling" myself. I'm lean more toward waiting on other's unsolicated support for something I've created or accomplished. I think there's some gender socialization in that.

I decided to go ahead, produce this book and self publish it in part as an experiment to see how the whole thing worked and because it seemed very similar to some of the "do it yourself" tacts women have taken on historical. Like, oh, for example in the US, gaining the right to vote. Go figure.

At my house we have something I call "chick tools." In the time it takes for one of the guys to wander off to the "real" tool shed, contemplate the benefits and disadvantages of one particular size gaget over another, make a choice and wander back to whatever needed tinkering with, I can have the dang thing fixed with a butter knife, a stick and a rock that were laying around nearby. Chick tools. I think of self publishing as a "chick tool." I still pretty much suck as a sales person, and the book I've published is a kind of oddity anyway, but I figure I've just gotten started and the jury's still out. Creating the book was very rewarding in itself.