The internet has created many problems in its young life – making various industries obsolete, enabling new forms of surveillance and control, exposing good, well-meaning people to crazy, vituperative trolls. But my internet problem is the surfeit of opportunity.

If there's one thing the network does brilliantly, it's reducing coordination costs. The two best examples, of course, are the GNU/Linux operating system and Wikipedia. Whether you use these or not, whether you believe them to be of high or low quality, it's impossible to imagine how decentralised collectives could produce either an operating system or an encyclopedia without the internet.

(I like to daydream fleets of Analogue Wikipedia lorries racing around the world with filing cabinets representing the day's edits, then racing back to the enormous Wikipedia Central Printing Office to retrieve a new load to deliver.)

When I began writing, I imagined that the central problem of my working life would be figuring out which books to write, and how to produce the best books I could. These problems decompose into a lot of smaller problems: which books and music and movies should I consume to inspire my work? Which experts and artists should I seek out and converse with in order to improve my work?

Once upon a time, the questions of which books, music, experts and experiences you should try were largely answered by circumstance. Which books to read? Which ones can you afford, which ones are on the library's shelf, which ones are in the shop, which ones can you discover? The pool of experts was limited to people who lived nearby or those to whom your immediate circle could introduce you. Half the problem was solved by default – the cost of seeking out a very rare book almost always exceeded the value you'd get from reading it.

My internet problem is the one so many of us struggle with: how do you choose when the constraints of geography, income and circumstance disappear? What goes in a playlist when all the music ever recorded is one click away? Which experts' thought processes should you tap into when tens of millions of them are on Twitter? How do you choose a book from the millions that you can discover with a Google Books search?

But as hard as it is to navigate the infinite universe of potential input, deciding what to do with all that information is even harder.

For example, last week I became a book publisher. I'd reached the point where I had enough short fiction for another reprint collection. I'd done two before with small, reputable New York houses, and they had sold well. But, having looked around at the tools for publishing – print-on-demand presses like Lulu.com, automated ebook workflow tools like SiSu, and tools for publicising work like Twitter and blogs – I decided I could readily produce a collection myself with comparable reach and even more income.

I decided that I'd give the ebooks away (as I've done with my other books); sell a variety of paperbacks with different covers (the net made it easy to tap artist friends for cover designs and work with them over long distances); and do 250 super-limited, hand-sewn hardcovers with all sorts of premium stuff – an SD card set into the cover with the audiobook and full text and unique endpapers made of original sentimental paper ephemera donated by dozens of writer friends from all over the world. The audiobook was read by voice-actor pals in three countries, and mastered by a talented engineer in Washington I've worked with before (I'm giving away the electronic version of this and selling the CDs on Lulu.com). There's lots of exciting stuff to be done with print-on-demand publishing – for example, if you find a typo and send it to me, I'll correct it straightaway and give you a footnote on the page, so you can buy a copy with your name in it (I jokingly call this "monetising the typo").

Here's where the choice problem begins to manifest itself in earnest.

There's so much that you can do to elaborate on a project of this nature: limited edition covers, pricing experimentation, novel forms of audio distribution … While this sort of thing was once constrained by the inherent capital costs of trying them, no such costs obtain today: all of these things can be done for "free", costing only the time spent in trying them out.

So much of our sensibilities are honed by evaluating the cash outlay for various courses of action – it's hard to tamp down the elation at discovering that some formerly expensive action now can be had merely for the time it takes to seize on the opportunity.

I'm not sorry I decided to become a publisher. For one thing, it's been incredibly lucrative thus far: I've made more in two days' worth of the experiment than I made off both of my previous short story collections' entire commercial lives (full profit/loss statements will appear as monthly appendices in the book). And I'm learning things about readers' relationship to writers in the 21st century.

But more than ever, I'm realising that the old problem of overcoming constraints to action has been replaced by the new problem of deciding what to do when the constraints fall away. The former world demanded relentless fixity of purpose and quick-handed snatching at opportunity; the new world demands the kind of self-knowledge that comes from quiet, mindful introspection.

An abundance of opportunity is a funny kind of problem to wrestle with, but it is a problem – and a hard one, since abundance manifests itself as noise that must be ignored in order to stop reacting and start introspecting.

But don't get me wrong: I'll take the "too many great possibilities" problem over the scrabble for opportunity any day.