If you already have a reputation, you do not need a publisher to publish a book. Hire your own editor, if you want, then create a pdf file and send it to LULU. They will publish it at the same cost to you that it would have in a bookstore, and you can order them one at a time as people ask for copies. The reason this works is that the old economic rationale for publishers — that it was incredibly expensive to print just one book so you needed the economies of scale from printing many identical copies of the same book after a print run had been set up — no longer hold true when the only retooling needed to go from one book to another is to load a new pdf file into the computerized printer. Publishers are in sad shape because the only real “value added” they have to bring to their authors today is the expertise of their editors and the prestige of their imprimatur. But if you already have a reputation you don’t need their prestige, and nowadays the best editors are free-lance…
