In years past, when people have asked me what I thought about self-publishing, my usual response was negative. It's too expensive, I would explain. You have to do all the sales, marketing and distribution yourself. You end up with a closet or trunk or garage full of books. And to most writers (including me), self-publishing was evidence that you didn't have a book good enough to be published the "real" way. Why else would you do it yourself?

Which is to say, I was a traditional-publishing snob.

I have changed my mind.

Last week I released my first self-published e-book. It's available for $3.99 as a PDF here. It's available for $3.99 on Amazon Kindle here. Within the week, it should be available for Barnes & Noble Nook and iBooks. I designed the cover. I wrote the descriptive copy. I formatted it for Kindle. I did everything but copy-edit the manuscript (a task I hired out to my friend and former Relevant editor Cara Davis). Now I'm selling it myself, as well as through big distributors like Amazon and B&N.

Why? Because self-publishing has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. Let me count the ways:

Timing: For the last few years, I've been trying to get publishers to let me update my first book, Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse, in order to add a chapter or two about the 2012 doomsday phenomenon. I met significant roadblocks. Though published in 2005 and impossible to find anywhere other than Amazon and Relevant, it's still technically in print. Also, there are still a lot of unsold copies sitting in a warehouse, and gaining back the rights would be way too expensive for a publisher (or me) to bet on. I started looking into a repackage in 2009, without success. Then it became 2010. Then it was 2011, at which point I scrapped the Apocalypse update idea and pitched the idea of a standalone Pocket Guide to 2012. There was some interest from Jossey-Bass, the publisher of my last three Pocket Guides, except for two major hesitations. First, sales of my other Pocket Guide books hadn't been as high as expected. Second, the shelf life for a 2012 book was…about a year long. I was pitching a book with an expiration date.

In September of this year, they declined the book. I was ready to go with Plan B: I decided to publish it anyway as an e-book. Because I could write it during September, October and November…and then publish it in December. I could have it on digital shelves within weeks of finishing the manuscript. It could be available for all of 2012 and then, once (SPOILER ALERT) nothing happened and we survived to enjoy 2013, I would not be saddled with unsold hard-copies of out-of-date books. Digital publishing is immediate. All it cost me was my time writing the book.

Ease: A major drawback of self-publishing is the work your publisher does once the manuscript is finished. It must be edited (I paid an editor for this). It needs a cover (I'm a professional graphic designer and designed my own). It needs marketing copy (I'm a professional copywriter and wrote my own). It must be formatted for Kindle, Nook, etc. (I figured it out). It needs to be distributed (Amazon and Barnes & Noble and my website do this for me). It needs to be marketed (the truth is that midlist writers like me are used to doing a lot of self-marketing anyway, even with our traditionally published books).

Kindle Direct Publishing and B&N's PubIt! platform make self-publishing much, much easier than it used to be. The hardest part about the whole process is…actually writing the book.

Money: Here's my dirty little secret: I don't make anywhere close to a living writing books. I have a full-time job in addition to my writing career. Most authors do. In fact, I probably will make more this year in my "real" job than I have made cumulatively from all of my books combined. (And while my single-income family is comfortable enough for Amarillo, Texas, I'm by no means making big bucks as a self-employed marketing professional.) With most of my book contracts, I'm making 12-18% on the "net receipts" of books sold. If one of my books sells for $9.99, I make a bit more than $1 a book. The rest of that money goes into editing costs, production costs, marketing costs, my agent at the time of the contract, and mostly to the publisher's overhead and bottom line.

In the Kindle store, my traditionally published Pocket Guides are listed right now at $8.09. That contract came about before much was happening on the e-book front, and my digital royalty rate is low, the same as my print royalty rate. I make around $1 on each of those sales. On the other hand, O Me of Little Faith is available on Kindle for $9.99. With that contract, I get a whopping 25% royalty from OMOLF e-book sales, so each time you download that book I'll earn around $2.50. That royalty rate is pretty standard these days.

But for Kindle books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, Amazon pays its self-published authors a 70% royalty. I've retained all the rights to Pocket Guide to 2012. I can price it whatever I want. I've set the price at $3.99. When you download it, I make in the vicinity of $2.70.

I will make more per download on my $3.99 book than I make on my $9.99 books. And which books are you more likely to download? My cheap one? Or my expensive ones?

That's why used-to-be traditionally published authors like J. A. Konrath advocate so hard on behalf of e-book self-publishing these days: because they're making more money doing it this way.

I don't have dreams of becoming rich on Pocket Guide to 2012. After all, it turns into a pumpkin in 12 months. But I've put a lot of hours into my writing career — a lot — and the opportunity to be better compensated for it is one I welcome.

Stigma: Amanda Hocking signed with a Big Six publisher after finding fantastic success as a self-pubbed e-book author. J.A. Konrath is more successful self-publishing than he was with a mainstream publisher. Barry Eisler is doing it. Seth Godin is doing it. Self-publishing a book no longer means your book wasn't good enough to be published for real. Those walls are disappearing, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sure, there are still some bad books out there being self-published, just like there are some bad books out there being traditionally published. But the self-publishing stigma is diminishing quickly. In the future, I predict more and more midlist, traditionally published authors like me will begin to explore the self-published e-book approach, just like successful performers like Louis CK are exploring how to market their work directly to consumers rather than giving up all the rights to some corporate entity. It's better for authors. It's better for content creators. It's better for readers and consumers (cheaper books!). I think it will change publishing, in a good way.

Pocket Guide to 2012 is my self-publishing test run. I want to see what will happen, and I'm excited about it.

I hope you are, too. You can show it by buying a book. (See what I did there? I'm a marketing genius!)