This is the best account I've seen of of the costs related to self-publishing I've seen. I had a similar experience when I was working with my publisher to do the "Best of Your Square Life" and again when I was doing my runs of t-shirts a few years back. I thought maybe my problem with small profit margins was scale, only printing a few hundred books and around around a hundred t-shirts at a time, but I think I was doing fairly well all considered. If you get bored with large blocks of numbers, take a look at the "Combined Sales Scenarios" for the breakdown of percentage of books needed to sell before the break even point for an independent artist.
