I looked around for a while for which sub forum I should latch onto, in order to suck out advice and suggestions like a lamprey. If this is not the right or best one, I can only pray forgiveness and ask that this thread be punted somewhere more suitable.
I have a lot of material for a custom setting. It has very few art assets, but it is - mostly - well and clearly written, edited, and presentable. I would stack it up against any set of official 3.5 campaign setting material (though I know enough of the OCD drafting process to understand that this feeling would probably only last about two hours into third-party editing by professional sources). It includes about 200 pages of drafted content as of writing this OP, including material on races, classes, custom feats, a custom system for technomancy (think Magika by Paradox Interactive, or the Words of Power system), and all the fripperies you'd expect from a two-course complete campaign setting, one being the settings material, written in-character by an adventurer of the setting, and the other being the much drier and crunchier rules set and game information.
The "mostly" in the previous paragraph is a reference to the fact that some of this material is still in a very rough form. To prepare for a new campaign, I have been fleshing out and drafting this rough material, towards the goal of handing my players two complete and professional-looking PDFs that they can peruse at their leisure, so that they have the chance ahead of time to let the setting percolate into their heads, e.g.: to know why the invention of steam power in Five Cities forced a lot of halflings into the coal mines.
Something occurred to me in the middle of this process: I could make a stab at actually producing this material as a third-party publisher, assuming I was egotistical and brave enough to do so. After all, I had spent stupid amounts of time on creating and refining it, and I liked money. It helps pay for coffee, electricity and water, with which I can brew more coffee. But I have never done this "third-party publishing" thing that I hear is all the rage these days. To be fair, as an English major I have a sort of parallel understanding of the publishing business, but I'm pretty sure that this understanding has little in common with publishing under Pathfinder's open d20 license, not to mention how to do so successfully.
That said, I'm turning to you guys for advice. What should I do to possibly get the ball rolling? What should I not do? Who has a good book-printing service, or should I stay completely digital? Who can I go to for third-party editing, or can I do it completely in-house as long as I'm confident in my ability to do so? What licensing pit falls should I know about ahead of time? Am I crazy for even considering this? You know, all the boring stuff that comes after late nights hugging my coffee and spinning out a world for players to enjoy.
TLDR: Potential first time publisher asking for advice from people who actually know what they're doing.