A definite great read..Jim Bean

After several years of writing material that was probably just a little too much age 18+ for publication (mostly written out of frustration at the overly sanitized versions that were the only things allowed by the gatekeepers to the royals) I found a small publisher who gets my work on SmashWords, MobiPocket, FW, B&N, and of course, Amazon. And they use CreateSpace for print as well as everything being eBook. So I heartily second your narrative as 21st century publishing not being your grandfather’s Oldsmobile.

The one thing missing from your history is how the Internet spawned free and paid for story sites (first Usenet, then StoriesOnline, Literotica, Ellora’s Cave, and many others) that incubated writers while providing fiction — some great, some pretty bad — that would never be published in print by any established imprint — yet were stories many people have enjoyed reading. These sites allowed readers to vote and give feedback to authors to improve the genre and help hone writing skills, and are — I feel — an important element to what came next. In these sites you can find a profusion of stories you’d never have had a chance to read otherwise because of the high cost of Vanity Press, and they’re coded for content by their authors and rated by your fellow readers to help you make your choices. There is already more free reading material out there right now from these sources than most of us could read in the rest of our lives. This helped new authors to realize that their work was worthy of publishing once the opportunity of low risk/low cost entry to the book market became available.

As far as this author is concerned, the established publishing houses and their gatekeepers can either evolve into the new market, or go the way of the buggy whip makers. My publisher operates under the new, and no doubt very scary, model to the established houses of returning 100% of its royalties to its authors. It utilizes other methods to cover its relatively low overhead costs.

I now have 11 titles up on the big retailers, with more to come soon. Prior to this revolution I had zero.

Thanks for a good read here today.