One cloudy afternoon last July, a nervous group of six women writers gathered in the back garden of the novelist Miranda Glover’s Oxfordshire home to watch a barefoot woman in a little black dress hurl herself, repeatedly, from a stool. The forecast was for rain, so Miranda’s photographer husband, Charlie, snapped away quickly while the writers opened some champagne and their children ran around. Soon they were all laughing and taking turns to fling themselves into the air. The television and radio producer Jennie Walmsley leapt so high she hurt her ankle. The journalist Lucy Cavendish was amused to discover later, on looking at the photographs, that she was less of a kangaroo than she felt. “It was such an enjoyable day,” she says, “and I think it looks really professional.”

She’s right. The Leap Year – a collection of short stories by the Contemporary Women Writers’ Club – does look professional. It has a glossy cover with a photo of the leaping lady (no telltale stool, children or champagne glasses in shot) and an inviting testimonial from the comic novelist Kathy Lette. It has a blurb, a price and a barcode. You can buy it on Amazon. But, conventionally speaking, The Leap Year isn’t “professional”. It’s a self-published book. “Both Miranda and I are conventionally published novelists,” says Cavendish, “so of course I initially winced at the idea of self-publishing. The cliché is of mad people publishing letters to their dead aunts.” But, although they wanted to see the collection of short fiction they had produced in their writing group on their shelves, they knew publishers wouldn’t be interested.

“So we put £250 each into a pot, went online and bought the self-publishing package that looked the best. It was a massive learning curve, but a few months later, here it is, our book. We won’t make any money out of it, but we’re really proud of it.”

Cavendish and her friends aren’t alone in making the leap into self-publishing. Grosvenor House Publishing (from whom they bought their self-publishing package) saw a 20 per cent increase in business last year and Jane Rowland, the editor of The Self Publishing Magazine, confirms that the sector is growing “probably due to the well-documented shrinking of commercial book lists and budgets, coupled with a population that is more determined, and financially able, to pursue their publishing ambitions”.

Although there is no way of breaking down the types of book being self-published, Rowland estimates that it’s 60 per cent fiction and 40 per cent non-fiction. With the growing number of self-publishers comes a new public respect for self-published authors. So commentators who once derided “vanity published” writers are now beginning to acknowledge an empowered DIY culture. It’s no longer publishing for rejects, but “alternative publishing”; a bold stance outside the homogenised mainstream.

Self-published literature is nothing new. It’s been around, in one form or another, since the printing presses got rolling. John Milton, Mark Twain, Beatrix Potter and Walt Whitman are just a few of the more celebrated self-publishers. What self-publishers may lack in professional experience, they can gain in creative control. In some cases writers have been able to make a fast buck without having to share their profits with publishers.

In the late Twenties, DH Lawrence self-published Lady Chatterley’s Lover (its sexual content made it unpublishable in England by the usual channels). He paid to have it printed privately in Florence then sent hundreds of sales leaflets to the United States and Britain and made himself £1,000 within the year. More recently, initially self-published novels include James Redfield’s 1993 new-age adventure The Celestine Prophecy, which spent 165 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list; Jill Paton Walsh’s medieval fable Knowledge of Angels made the 1994 Booker Prize shortlist and G P Taylor’s children’s book Shadowmancer topped the bestseller lists for 15 weeks, seeing him dubbed “hotter than Potter”. Who’d have guessed – when the policeman-turned-Anglican vicar sold his Harley Davidson to pay for 2,000 copies to be printed back in 2002 – that today he’d have a publishing deal with Faber and be fending off questions about whether Michael Caine will star in the movie?

Over the past decade, advances in technology have brought self-publishing within the grasp of millions. Digital printing has opened the door to Print on Demand (POD) publishing, which allows for small runs of texts at a fixed price per unit (the average novel should cost around £3.50). This is cheap and cuts down on the need for storage space. And it doesn’t waste trees. Jane Rowland says: “There are special packages, usually offered by self-publishing service providers who work with POD, that can include all the pre-press work, an ISBN number, marketing and a couple of copies of your completed book which can start at around £800.”

Then there’s the power of the internet. In the old days authors would have had to lug boxes of books around shops, fairs and festivals, hoping to attract readers. But the web allows authors and readers from all around the world to find each other. Rowland says that there a number of online services, such as Lulu, UniBook and Yudu, which “allow authors to upload their book for free, then they pay to print and ship copies. Or an author could self-publish an e-book, making it available as a PDF download.”

For anyone aspiring to sell in bulk, though, Rowland still recommends doing things the old way – lithographically. “One thousand copies of a basic 250-page novel should perhaps cost about £3,000 to produce lithographically but £4,500 via POD.”

There are writers out there making a decent “hobby income” on their fiction. Ron Clooney, a 54-year-old English teacher from Southampton, has sold thousands of copies of his two self-published thrillers and made around £15,000 by “giving it some welly” at bookshop signings and selling via his website. “It started as a bit of a joke,” he says. “But now I’m thinking of writing full time.”

Polly Courtney, a 29-year-old former investment banker, also made money self-publishing her novel, Golden Handcuffs, in 2006. “In self-publishing,” she says, “you get all that is left from each book sale after the retailer’s cut (roughly 55 per cent of the cover price), the distribution costs (15 per cent) and, of course, the printing costs (10 to 15 per cent), which works out at around 20 per cent, or £1.50 per book. If you’re in a traditional publishing deal, you’ll receive royalties of around 6 per cent or 45 pence.” Courtney now has a three-book deal with HarperCollins but admits that she misses being in control: “I don’t have a say in what my books are called any more.”

Those who are infected by the DIY spirit can go one further than Rooney and Courtney and start their own publishing company, as Shena Cooper did earlier this year. It cost the former teacher, her daughter and a family friend just £30,000 to launch Secret Seed Society and begin producing picture books that aim to engage young children with the world of vegetable-growing via colourful characters. They found their printer on Facebook and worked with him to ensure minimum wastage in the manufacture of their books which they sell via their website.

“We’ll have to sell 40,000 copies of each £5.50 book to turn a profit,” says Cooper, “but I keep reminding myself that there are millions of children out there. There aren’t many enterprises I’d launch in a recession, but both vegetable growing and self-publishing make sense right now.”