I recently published my first book, Alice in Condoland. It was a 30-month labor of love that got me through the worst of the pandemic. I worked with a wonderful indie publisher, 3 Swallys Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They wrote a press release and reached out to some bookstores. The rest was up to me.

Self-publishing isn’t new. Beatrix Potter’s, Jane Austen, and Mark Twain all did it at some point in their careers. But the advent of online book sellers have brought indie- and self-published authors to…