How can a person publish his/her own book?

My father is a poet. He has written more than 15 books in Telugu literature. All are based on our old Purana. Some are historic novels, some are poem books and some are small stories. All of them got published by him only except one. That one book is published by Brown Academy. Some are financed by others. A book of about 100 pages costed him about Rs.25,000/- per 1000 copies. Now a days the printing is my desk top printing only. They will make a CD and give you. Once you correct all the mistakes and you are happy, they will do the correction and get you the copies. Recently I got one of his book. It comes to about 15000 rupees for 70 pages. The book is 1/4 size pages.
As you said generally the publishers will not publish books of unknown authors, but they will come forward if one or two of your books got published and earned good name.
My father sends his book for publishing in monthly journals called KANAKA PRABHA. This is a monthly magazine published by Durga Temple, in Vijayawada. They publish this as a serial and they pay a little money as a token. But once the response is good publishers will come.
You have 3 options. Going to a publisher. But it is difficult right now. Going to a weekly or monthly magazine related your field to publish it as a serial or full at one time. Some magazines do that. The last one is to publish by yourself. I have also mentioned you the rough cost of publication.

Publishing a book these days are not that difficult. Home computer can prepare the draft. If one is familiar with the computer applications in book printing and editing it makes less expensive. Cost of these might vary from place to place and also it will depend on the materials used. Different qualities of paper are used, these days, for printing and binding books. Very cheap to very costly materials are available in the market. Hence decision about the quality of the product has to decided earlier.
I have published three books. But all were based on the demands of publishers. Hence what I did was just handed over the manuscript to them. The rest they did and have me the royalty.

A person can publish a book in India is possible in four ways which are given under :-

1. Publishing via Traditional publishers Directly :- Do a research and analysis on the traditional book publishers available and check their guidelines to submit the manuscript.
2. Publishing via Traditional publishers through Agents:- Make a list for follow-ups and identifying proper channels to expedite your submission in certain cases can be done via publishing agents.
3. Self-Publishing Directly:- The author can self-publish the book. No agent or other third party assistance will be needed in that case. But the author must be having end-to-end skill-set to cover all the aspects of pre-production and post-production activities.
4. Self-Publishing using professional assistance:- You can get professional assistance from self-publishing company like 24by7 Publishing to get your book edited, beautified and designed for your target reader book and then publish.

It is very true that publishing a book through a reputed publisher is very difficult as there are many writers or authors in the fray.
There are another ways to publish a book like submitting it online in some reputed sites or publishing it through a publisher by spending own money.
If you want to publish a book by spending your own money then you have to contact a publisher and ask him for estimate by telling him the approximate number of pages. He will give you some options regarding the quality of paper, type of the book and other small things associated with publishing.
Based on all these things he will quote you a price generally for publishing 1000 books at a time.
Of course if you are interested to publish more than that quantity that is also possible and cost per copy may further reduce.
The cost of publishing of a book consisting of 100 pages varies from Rs15000 to 25000 for a quantity of 1000 books depending upon the paper quality and over all get up of the book.
Anyway if cost is an issue one can try to release his book in online platform where also it can get noticed if the quality of reading material in the book is of considerably good quality.

In todays scenario it is really a very very difficult task to get a book published by a publishing house on the prima facie assurance that it may do well in the market.

The only option left in such a case is to go to publish the book on our own account and pay for the expenses.

Now the expenses will basically depend on the publishing house and their standard rates, type of publishing required whether very high quality or moderate one, size of the book whether it is small book or long story book and number of copies required to be printed in first edition or lot.

On an average the cost per book to be paid for such work ranges from Rs 200 to 250 if a minimum of 1000 books are ordered to be printed. This is the reason why most of the fictions and non-fictions in market are available for a price in that range or even more than that.

So publishing ones book oneself is a costly affair because you do not know how it will be received in the market and whether the money spent will be realized back or not.

It is my dream to publish a book one day, so I used to always check out for options and the cost involved to publish a book. Last month I was able to publish a book and since the copies that I needed was very less, it cost us around 400 Rs per copy which is way too expensive but if the printing is in bulk amount, per copy would cost you less than Rs 100 based on the number of pages and the number of books. This is if you are really insistent on publishing a hard copy.

We can also publish a book through many websites available online for free, one of them being myebook.com. You can also establish yourself by publishing e-books for a price of your choice. Publishing e-books cost us nothing, except for the effort that we need to put the contents together. Some websites will even design the cover page for you. They make it that easier.

When it comes to publishing your book, you have to options

1. Self publish
2. Agency publishing

In case of self publishing, you have to go through process of editing, proof reading, book cover design and marketing. All of this on your own. You can hire other people and delegate some work of this project. But it is going to cost you a lot. And though if you have reasonable price, it may cost a lot if there is a lot of demand. Some people can pull this out on their own if they have good contacts on print media and marketing. So this can be a good option for both physical book and the ebooks.

For agency publishing you need to share the royalty with the publishing agency. They just need your book draft and they take care of the proof reading, editing and cover stuff. And that does work out just fine. Usually you get around 28 to 40% of the royalty from your book. And that can be huge depending on how it is vetted by the agency. But marketing and everything is taken care of in this process. So this is a good option when you don't have money to spend on. But here the agency retains right to sign contract and they may not publish with you. So in such case you have to go with self publish option.

For self publish option you have gumroad, Kindle publishing, smashwords and few other ebook retailers. And in case of the agency publishing you have to find out the companies specific to your state or the national level and may send a draft.