Thank you for all of this helpful information, Jack Preston King! No need to apologize, I’m glad you jumped in! It was nice to read your perspective on this since you have so much experience. There is so much information floating around out there about publishing and it is hard to sift through. Getting the opinion of someone who knows about it first-hand is very valuable to me, so thank you again! I am going to visit the links you included, as well.

One worry I had was editing. Did you have your books professionally edited/proofread? My novel is a large document and one of the reasons I’ve always shied away from self-publishing is that I don’t feel confident that I can catch every single error. I’ve workshopped it and had people close to me read it, but I still don’t believe that I’ve corrected every typo or spelling/grammatical error. I know they’re hiding in there somewhere.

Again, thanks for stepping in!