It’s been a lit­tle over a year since my first book was pub­lished, and I find myself reflect­ing. Prior to pub­li­ca­tion, I spent about a year and a half try­ing to learn how the book busi­ness worked. And let me tell you, it turned out to be a lot dif­fer­ent than I thought. I guess I was stuck in 1985, think­ing in pre-internet terms. I had in my mind this glo­ri­ous com­pany … the pub­lisher. After all, it had been pub­lish­ers who had sup­plied my con­stant need to read over the course of my entire life. I had some­how asso­ci­ated every great story with these pub­lish­ers rather than the authors who wrote them. And I did not real­ize how dra­mat­i­cally times had changed. Drat, you may say. For that’s exactly how I reacted. But soon I came to see the changes in this topsy-turvy busi­ness work to my advan­tage. In the past three years I’ve seen ebook read­ers and inter­net pub­lish­ing change from trends into busi­ness as usual. While it is my sin­cere hope that big pub­lish­ers are not totally lost, I can’t help but join the ranks of authors who feel like they’ve been tram­pled by those com­pa­nies. But that’s a post for another time. In the past decade there has been an entire indus­try grow from the ashes of those who have been burned. John Locke, Amanda Hock­ing, and about a gazil­lion more authors on twit­ter, face­book, and the inter­ent are in the process of chang­ing the world. Even pub­lish­ing stan­dards like Richard Paul Evans are reserv­ing their ebook rights. And they aren’t alone. Exec­u­tives too see what’s hap­pen­ing; such as Ruth Har­ris who left the pub­lish­ing houses behind to go out on her own. I could go on and on, and I haven’t even men­tioned big pub­lisher suc­cesses, such as Claire Cook who walked the red car­pet when her book Must Love Dogs was set on the sil­ver screen, and still do most of their own mar­ket­ing work, some­thing the pub­lish­ers are sup­posed to do. And yet, even with the writ­ing on the wall, there are still a few deter­mined peo­ple claim­ing that inde­pen­dent authors are more like rejects than the real thing. At the thought I almost start laugh­ing. Sim­ply put, all it takes to find out the truth is to join the indus­try. It’s a whole new world out there. And to tell you the truth, I kinda like it.