Indie publishing here I come! Maybe.

Picture by George Eastman House

After two years, I woke up. Two years of writing a novel and always hearing in the back of my mind the little publisher's voice saying "When this is done you can work on your query letter then send it off to 500 agents and maybe get found in the slush pile. Or you can spend big bucks at conferences and maybe meet an agent there. And then wait another year for a publishing house to accept your book and maybe another year until it is in print."

I've lived with that voice ever since I've started writing. Even more annoying is the fact that the voice sounds like a bossy 3-year-old kid.

Last week, that voice was silenced, thanks to writers like Amanda Hocking and Kait Nolan who are not waiting around for someone else to control their creative works. Writers have the tools available to get our work out to readers. If you aren't a famous writer already, a publishing house is not going to give you a big marketing budget so you'll have to do a ton of book promoting yourself anyway. Why go through the process above when you can put your book out online, do the promoting and see if it sinks or swims? Not wait two or three years for a publisher to pick it up.

People may say that the quality isn't as good as if a writer polished and polished their novel until it shone enough that an agent picked it up. If no one is buying your book or writing good reviews, you'll know soon enough. Then you take the book off the internet and/or write another. Just a simple click of the mouse.

Fail fast, fail often. The entrepreneur's mantra. And get your product the heck out there!

Having just received an e-reader for my birthday, I now understand the draw of instant book gratification. And they are so cheap! Wow! I can buy more books now because they are cheaper. I'm way more willing to try new authors if their book is $2.99 and I can get it on my Kindle in less than 5 minutes.

This is not to say that I don't see the point of publishing houses. I am still going to query agents because of course getting my book on a bookshelf will help sales and also going through the query process will improve my writing skills. When my book is good enough to receive feedback from agents that is!

It's an exciting time to be a writer! What do you think?