Pat Holt, on her Holt Uncensored Blog, has had an interesting series of posts on what she calls the DIY author. These are people (she starts with Seth Harwood) who have essentially bucked or avoided or been ignored by the major publishing houses—that is until they’ve created an online platform and established a fan base—and have done it themselves, creating iPhone apps, podcasts, offering up their work for free, and so forth.

I am not, as Holt termed Harwood, one of “the new breed of whiz-kid authors.” I’m a middle-aged novelist who published two novels way too long ago, has ghosted a number of nonfiction books (some of which have been national bestsellers [which, believe me, does not make me anything close to rich]) and has one complete novel on the shelf that was enthusiastically turned down by all of the major publishing houses, and another that’s almost ‘finished,’ finished meaning in this case I almost have the ending done, but much work still needs to be done. Continue reading →