Unfortunately the answer for your friend is simple: He got scammed. If a "publisher" asks you to pay for everything, or indeed for anything but postage, they ar

Unfortunately the answer for your friend is simple: He got scammed. If a "publisher" asks you to pay for everything, or indeed for anything but postage, they are a scammer. There are entire message boards dedicated to authors warning other authors away from such scams; look e.g. for Absolute Write's "Bewares" section or google "Yog's Law" ("Money flows toward the writer.") Paying for your own publication costs is called vanity press publishing, and it's okay provided you know what you're doing: You are almost certainly taking a big loss in order to get your work into paper form. You will only make money if you've got publishing talent, which equates to "marketing talent": You've got to be good at selling books, which is very hard, especially if you've never done it before. (Before I got distracted by the story of your poor friend, I was going to answer: many do self-publish, more and more every day, but you don't notice them as often because they aren't as well promoted. Also, whereas it's fairly easy to market tech books online non-tech books are far harder to sell without market knowledge that publishers have scraped together over decades, non-techie writers therefore lust after contracts, and techies imitate non-techie writers. And, because getting a publishing contract probably increases the odds that your book will get finished, because someone else is pushing you toward completion, when we survey the universe of manuscripts we disproportionally sample the ones that get turned into finished books by publishers.) (And, yes, e-readers are busily upending this centuries-old industry, so ask again in five years for a completely different answer.)