I’ve been writing for most of my life at this point. No one in my family can remember a time when I didn’t have a notebook and pen in hand, scribbling down my latest world.

For the longest time, I wrote for myself. I didn’t intend for it to really go anywhere, I just knew that I liked to create worlds and the stories that went with them.

That changed a few years ago when I became serious about getting published. This was before ebooks even existed, so I sent off my queries to agents and got back the standard form letter rejections.

I looked into vanity presses but the fact that you needed thousands of dollars up front put me off from that rather quickly.

As I got a little older and gained more responsibilities, my writing dropped off. A couple of years ago I wrote a novella that I posted on fictionpress.org. To my surprise, I got a lot of positive feedback from it. So I decided to give publishing another go.

I pulled the novella off of fictionpress and rewrote it. I added in new a new character arc and refined the writing a bit. But as I was preparing to send it off to agents I heard about the boom that ebooks had become and learned tthat self-publishing was a viable option that wasn’t going to cost thousands of dollars up front. I submitted my novel to a couple of small ebook publishers and got some solid feedback from several of the. That novel would need to be rewritten before I was ready for primetime.

But this time I wasn’t dissuaded. I had just stumbled upon a solid idea for a novel and I went to worn developing what wwould eventually turn onto The Cerberus Rebellion.

Now, the reason that I told you all of that was to give you a background for my point.

My brother texted me the other day and asked what I was planning tl sell my book for. I told him my planned price point and how much it would net me in royalties per unit.

When he asked me who I was going to work with for promotion and distribution, I told him that I was going to be releasing as an ebook through Amazon initially and that I was on my own for promotion. That brought up the question of what it would take to get my novel on bookshelves and I told him that first a major publisher would have to make an offer and that I would have to accept it.

He asked “Why wouldn’t you?” That lead to a conversation about how the publishing world has changed and how I would likely be making a fair amount of money by the time anyone noticed me.

I think that it was just revealing how many people don’t realize that the publishing world has shifted and a lot of people still look down on those who self-publish as of we aren’t really published authors.