I wish I could say that this post was going to provide the insights and ideas that any self-publishers might need or want, in seeking to distill the brand that they would like to create for themselves. Nope. This is more by way of a question to the Cosmos: Help! I don’t know what to do!
So there are a lot of challenges in self-publishing. There’s kind of an ideal convergence of factors that have to come together, in order for such endeavours to thrive–or even to achieve some modicum of success. Things like putting together a professional package, marketing it to the right people in the right way (and the fact with that is that what worked last year might well not work this year because we’re already inured to that novelty). This is the stuff that the publishers offered–or tried to.