Self-Publishing is very expensive to set up. You need a Production Room that is big enough to hold a lot of machines. I wait until I can buy the giant center building, using both wings for production rooms and the giant center for storage. This means the building needs no lounge, toilets, or heat. I still put in a cleaner but, but I probably don't need to. If you turn off clipping, you can fit 27 machines per wing, 3 rows of 9 machines. You make your production room extend into the hallway a few squares so the doorspace doesn't block your last machine.

The first level of machine produces 5k copies. For 27 machines, you will get 135k units per "cycle" of the machines. Each cycle costs a lot of money and you NEED to sell the games you make. You will lose a lot of money before you ever make any. The warehouse can hold just over 6.4m units.

If you pause after every Cycle, you can produce bursts of 135k, 270k, 405,000... You want to match your TOTAL units produced each burst (Standard, Deluxe, Premium) to be equal to this number. 100k, 25k, 10k usually does me about right. If you accidentally produce 145k, you will get a full second cycle of machines just to produce 10k games, which can be a huge financial waste.

The first thing to note is that you should not be self-publishing unless you are selling lots of games. For my 6.4m space, I like to pretend I can have 5 games with about 1.3m total copies each.

Observe the copies each game sold this week. Produce enough to keep up with the sales, while maintaining a Stock of approx. 2-4 weeks of the current rate of sales. As your game's sales start to dwindle, you don't want a stock of 2m games that is selling 40k/wk. Waste. You want that game to have maybe 200k in stock.

ALWAYS do market research - look at your excess Deluxe and Collector games, and adjust. I had a handful of games with too many of these copies, so I stopped making them for those games until my stock of them came down, and ensured I was producing just under the percentage.

When you look at Game Reports, pay attention to how many want a Deluxe and Collector version. You want to produce approx. 1% under this, so that you don't accidentally produce a bunch of expensive collector's edition games.

I manage about 8 games at a time (2 hot/new or newish, 2-4 games past their peak, and about 3-5 that are still selling enough games to justify producing the next few rounds).

To reduce the workrate of producing games, it is important to find the rhythm of your machine's pulse.

Your production situation might be different, here is what remains the same:
L1 Machines produce 5k copies of a game per cycle.
You want production rooms at minimum, big enough to produce a week of sales in a pulse. I
f you made a 20 machine room for the 1990s, that would let you sustain about 3-5 games.
If you are in the 1980s and want to jump in with 10 machines, that will let you keep about 3-5 games actively supported.

When you first start self-publishing, you should set your Standard to 19. Deluxe and Collector Editions should always be sold at the smallest price point, which is determined by your Standard game price. The price point of 19 increases the sales and makes profit, a healthy middle point. If a game starts to sell too much (which can happen), bump the price back up to 29 (and readjust your Deluxe and Collector editions).

When you increase prices on standard, the other prices are pushed up - when you decrease prices, they are not automatically pushed down, you must pay attention and do this yourself.

I once failed to keep up with my production, so by making my newest games more expensive, I fixed the problem. I had several older games chugging along at 20k with 400k in stock because I overshot. I reduced price to 9 - I still made profit, but more importantly, I sold out the last copies and plunked that old game to make room in my warehouse for something I could justify having 400k copies of.

Remember, what matters is 3 things when self-publishing:
1. Money. You should, every several weeks, determine if your price should move down a few bucks or even up. Sometimes, increasing the price a bit won't harm your sales too much.
2. Production Time/Workrate - it can be a LOT of clicks, and require steady attention. This is a high workrate section of the game, and you want to build the biggest production that will not strain you to manage.
3. Publisher of the Year - once you get some of these nice rewards you can remove all the worthless room deco just for deco and plop 1 of these instead. Brings room quality up 5 stars.