To promote herself and her business, JL, one of my subscribers, wants to write a book.

But she isn’t quite sure about how to get her book published and into print.

“It feels like getting a book published is challenging,” she writes. “Would it not be easier to skip all the details and self-publish?”

Other Direct Response Letter subscribers with the desire to write a book and get it published have asked me the same question over the years.

“What’s better?” an interviewer on an Internet radio show asked me, “Self-publishing or traditional publishing?”

It’s the wrong question.

Self-publishing is not inherently better than mainstream publishing, nor is the reverse true.

Rather, there are 3 basic publishing options available to you: traditional publishing, self-publishing, and electronic publishing.

And the choice of which is right for you depends on your reasons for wanting to write and publish a book in the first place.

Option #1: Traditional publishing

Of the 3 publishing options, selling your book to a mainstream book publishing company is the most prestigious.

Therefore, when you want to write a book to help establish you as a recognized expert in your field, traditional publishing is often the best option.

In the financial publishing industry, most stock market newsletter editors write at least one book for a mainstream publishing house.

Reason: being an author adds to their credibility, helping them sell subscriptions to their advisory letters.

Option #2: Self-publishing a physical book

Self-publishing your book as a printed paperback or hardcover makes sense when you want to give away a lot of copies of your book as a marketing tool.

Professional speakers are a good example, because they typically send a free book, along with their sales materials, to every potential client.

Giving potential clients a copy of your book is an effective marketing tool. Information marketing pioneer Jeffrey Lant says “a book is a brochure that will never be thrown away.”

The more professionally written, designed, and printed your self-published book, the more impressed your prospects will be.

Ideally, your self-published book should look no different than hardcover or trade paperback books from major publishers.

With self-publishing, your cost per copy is much less than buying your own book at the 50% author’s discount you get from a regular publisher.

As a result, authors who give away a lot of copies of their books can save a lot of money with self-publishing.

If your goal is to sell copies of your book directly—whether through mail-order magazine ads, the Internet, or at the back of the room during speaking gigs—self-publishing gives you a higher profit margin.

Option #3: Publishing your book as an e-book

Publishing your book as a downloadable PDF file—known as an “e-book”—is the clear choice when you want to (a) sell your book on the Internet and (b) maximize your profits from its publication and sale.

Why are e-books so profitable? Two main reasons.

First, with an e-book, you can charge more money for less content than with a regular book.

Most traditionally published business books today are at least 200 pages—around 80,000 words—selling for at least $15 in trade paperback or $20 in hardcover.

For an e-book, you can charge anywhere from $29 to $49 per copy, more if the book is on a specialized topic.

And although length varies, a $29 e-book can be only 50 pages—about 15,000 words.

That means it costs as much or more as a hardcover or paperback book while containing only one-fifth the text.

So it takes less writing time to produce an e-book than a regular book.

With an e-book, you deliver it to the buyer over the Internet as an electronic PDF file.

You can also format your e-book so Amazon can sell a Kindle version. My latest book had Kindle sales of over $9,000 last year.

With an e-book, there is no printing, storage, fulfillment, or shipping costs, so your profit margin on each sale is extremely high.

By comparison, authors who publish with mainstream publishers get a royalty averaging 10% or less of the book’s cover price.

The margin in self-publishing physical books is usually 50% give or take 10%. But with e-books, the margin can be close to 100%.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.