In these bad economic times, it is no surprise that many people are shunning expensive, high-tech gifts this holiday season, for gifts that are cheap in cost but priceless in love and creativity. Homemade crafts are seeing a dramatic rise this year, as detailed by this article from the New York Times.

The boom in crafts and related supplies contrasts with poor results for traditional retailers, like electronics retailers and department stores. The nation’s overall retail sales in November fell 7.4 percent from the year before, according to the Commerce Department.

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Even in 2008, when ebooks are steadily gaining in popularity and self-publishing is becoming more and more accepted, there are still a lot of myths out there, especially about the latter. You have probably heard them: People who self-publish can’t cut it with traditional publishers (ie. they are not good enough), self-publishing is only for family memoirs/histories, and the list goes on.

During my weekend blog reading I came across this post over at the TeleRead blog. The post basically gives the top ten myths about self-publishing and seeks to dispel such nastiness. I’m not going to run through all ten myths, you can read them yourself and make your own judgment. However, I would like to add my own two cents about a few things that were mentioned.

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After yesterday’s extremely depressing post about the grim realities of being a writer, I thought I’d try to cheer things up by writing about ways you can create your own brand of success.

All of yesterday’s post concentrated on publishing through traditional channels – getting a contract with one of the large publishing houses and placing your faith in them that they will get your book out to the masses (and it will actually sell). But why place your faith in someone else? You wrote your book. You put your sweat and tears into it. And you’re the one who has the most invested into the book (monetary and otherwise). Why not take control and make your own success?

I’m talking about self-publishing, of course. Before I begin, however, I want to say that this term still has a negative stigma attached to it. But that stigma lies mostly in the traditional publishing world. The great thing is self-publishing doesn’t even have to involve paying a company lots of money to publish your book – it doesn’t have to be that complicated, or that expensive.

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