I've been following Penelope Trunk's adventure with self publishing her own book with great interest. Apparently, she done really well with it. Trunk just wrote an excellent post about lessons that she learned from self publishing.

She's totally right about a number of things, including the fact that publishers don't promote authors. Authors must promote authors and use social media to do that. 

One of the problems with e-book and self published books is that people do need editors. They need outside eyes to look for inconsistencies and typos. (Actually, traditional publishers are doing a terrible job with that now.) 

If you are thinking about self-publishing or e-publishing a book and would like to hire an experienced editor, send me an e-mail. I'll hook you up with the right people.