There's a lot of good advice here. Some of it is conflicting, which isn't really surprising. Things that work for some people don't work for others. I thought I'd add a few things from the perspective of an independent publisher. The advantage of self-publishing is that you get to keep every penny of every book that sells. Yay! The thing is, I don't know of anyone who self-published so they could handle their own admin. It's a chore dealing with printers and distributors, getting your books out to reviewers. Keep in mind too that your print costs are up front, whereas the money you make from sales might be further down the line. Yes, crowd funding will alleviate that, and also show if there is an audience for your story.
One thing that a publisher brings to the table is distribution. I'm more likely to get my books into bookshops than you are, simply because I have a list of books that the sales team can present. If all you have is a single book, it can be a lot of work to get a shop to look at it. As well, and this is important, bookshops take things on Sale-or-Return. If they take a couple of copies and they don't sell, they'll return them.
Look around for Short Print Run companies, and not just ones that specialise in comics. Any decent printer can do comics - it's just another format, okay? And you might find that because they're a general printer, they might be less expensive than some of those printers who specialise in comics. Learn some of the terms that printers use. If in doubt, ask questions. Tell them what you're trying to do and get them to suggest different paper stock or finishes. When I first started, I published James Turner's Beaver and Steve vol 1. The printers I used gave me a quote, then told me if the book were about a cm smaller in both length and width, I could knock about UKP1000 off the print cost.
A couple of the larger printers in the US - Baker & Taylor and Lightning Source/Ingrams offer good prices for short print runs. What they also offer is an international network of printers. What this means is that once your title has been uploaded to their servers, it's available in the UK, Australia - anywhere that they have an affliliate - as a local print.
As was said before, follow the guidelines when pitching to a publisher. And be prepared too that even if they really like what they've seen, they still might not commit until you have the entire book (or in some cases the series) completed. Look at it from their POV. If this is your first work, they have no way of knowing if you're capable of finishing the story; so they won't want to put any money into it unless they can be fairly sure they'll have something to publish.
Personally, I'm okay with a series that's already been presented digitally. I figure it's already started to build the audience, and those people who really like the story will be happy to get a dead tree edition.Same goes if you've already published the story as a series of comics. Do what's best for you to keep up the momentum and the enthusiasm.
