Say you’ve spent the last year painstakingly writing a book, and now you are ready to offer it to the world. What do you do?

If you want to go old school, you can buy a copy of Writer’s Market, write query letters, painstakingly print and package up your book in manila envelopes, and mail it to agents and publishers. Then you wait. Unless you’re a prodigy, six months later you’ll have a lovely collection of rejection letters, an empty bank account, and more frustration than you can imagine for your trouble.

Or you can do what an increasing number of writers are doing now and give traditional media the bum’s rush by publishing the book yourself.

The Wall Street Journal reports how self-publishing, once dismissed as “vanity press” since writers would spend a small fortune to publish books that no one could buy, has utterly turned around in recent years.

Even as recently as a few years ago, self-publishing didn’t make a lot of economic sense. The first companies that offered print-on-demand services were difficult to use, and they left you with books that were poorly made and were very expensive to readers. Thirty dollars for a paperback was not uncommon, after the publisher recouped a $15 printing fee and the retailer marked the book up from there.

But today, these services have radically changed. It’s easy for anyone with a finished manuscript to get it into the proper format, and books can be printed on the cheap, just $3 or $4 a copy, which means you can get a book for sale on Amazon at a price that’s competitive with the rest of the market.

And best of all, writers are making money this way — lots of it. A traditional publisher may offer a 5 to 10 percent royalty on a book, while self-publishers usually end up keeping 50 percent (and higher for digital books). The result: Even if the self-publisher sells a fraction of the copies that a big publisher can move (hardly a guarantee), he’ll end up earning more money.

I know: I’ve self-published two books — one novel and one nonfiction book for aspiring writers. Originally I printed books in bulk and shipped them out of my garage. Now they’re both available as print-on-demand titles. I don’t have to do a thing except read the sales reports and send out the occasional review copy when professors say they’re considering a work for use as a textbook. It’s so much more fulfilling and more lucrative that I wouldn’t even consider starting out with a conventional publisher — although many writers are now using self-publishing as a starting point, with the goal of eventually selling the book to a bigger publishing house (with deep marketing pockets) after it’s already proven it has sales potential.

Meanwhile, book publishers continue to feud with Amazon over e-book pricing, while consumers are happy tobargain hunt for cheaper, self-published titles. Even big writers are experimenting with the no-publisher model, preferring to market directly to fans and keep the largess for themselves. Who can blame them? And more importantly, how’s your novel coming along?

— Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.