This is a really good question. If your book is related to faith or religion in anyway, a local church may be very interested in helping you find publishers and sponsers in your area. The same can be said for any particular bussiness, they might not be interested but it dosent hurt to try. If your book is about neither, you might have a hard time.

Its sad but the entertainment market is just way to over saturated for anyone to pay for your autobiography, unless they think your gonna somehow become the next Tolken. While yes, just like there are independent record labels and independent movie studios, there are non corporate publishing companys that might be interested in working with you. The problem with this is they are most likely going to be publishing radical or exremtly specific material that might not suit your book. The second problem being finding these people can be very difficult, and unless you amaze them with their first read, they wont work with you.

It may sound crazy, but printing a book yourself may be your best bet. Lloyd Kauffmen founder of Troma films (independent low budget film production company) wrote a book called "Make your own damn movie!" While this book obviously centers on movie production, alot of the basic sponsership, distrubution, and short cut ideas are relative to putting out your own literature or music.

Trust me i thought all of this was insane and that you had to have a million dollars to make a book or a cd, but its just not true. Im in an industrial band called Burnt Offerings and after sending my tape to people i gathered TONS of support from alot of different places, now im not on a record label but have CDs and records professinally pressed with little cost to me, what i do spend is worth it and usually made even in time. Ive also seen first hand success of putting out your own periodicals, books (only poetry so far), movies and other music. All local and all people did it with little cost to them.

The most important factor is saved for last though. If your looking to make money, stop right now. If you think you have extraordinary talent (which you very well could) start sending stories to everyone you can think of, who knows? a major publisher could pick you up. If you think you have average skills, give up right now, you will only break even or lose money.

The productive feeling is just as good as profit sometimes.