The Vanity Press in the Electronic Era

Not so very long ago, those few writers who tried to produce their own work rather than rely on traditional (and clique-based) publishers were considered pitiful individuals of inferior skills who couldn't break into print any other way. In fact, they even had a name for the industry that allowed writers to control their own products: the "vanity press." Those days, happily, are gone forever.

Today we know that artists of other types (musicians, filmmakers) produce their own work. Why not writers?

Self-publishing has come out of the closet recently, particularly with digital and other print-on-demand services that make publishing a book affordable for most budgets.

There's another twist on producing your own material. Writers today have the incredible (and not overly expensive) freedom of being able to publish what they write online. This allows them to write and publish their own products at low expense.

Now that also exposes the average writer to the vagaries and indignities of the publishing side of the writing business. Writers can publish their work, but unless the works find an audience, no one will read them. This means writers have to spread their wings a little to embrace marketing and distribution, as well as wordsmithing.

For writers willing to become entrepreneurs, this is great news, but it comes at a bit of a price. For one thing, today's writers are going to have to think a whole lot differently about the whole business of writing than writers in the time of Hemingway.

A writer must decide what work he or she wants to produce, for whom, and for what purpose.

There are those writers who are mainly interested in communicating their point of view or others who are primarily focused at this point in time in building an audience. If that describes you and you don't care about the money side of the business (yet), then a blog is a great way to start.

Blogs allow you to write a lot, possibly find an audience, perfect your message and craft, and possibly set the stage for a future book or product. Bloggers can even make money online, but it's a kind of income trickle at first for the nouveau-blogger. However, major blogs can provide a generous full-time income. Major blogs take quite a while to build. So the advantages of blogging for the aspiring writer are numerous.

An even bigger field for writers-turned-publishers involves writing an information product and then selling that product online. It is not particularly expensive to publish a book if you do it electronically.

Information can be anything that people are willing to pay forrecipes, how-to texts, courses, essays, devotionals, and histories. Not so long ago, all of this was published the traditional way of ink-on-paper. It was expensive for publishers and only top writers or information-providers got to play. Today, any writer can construct a course or product based on his or her own expertiseand produce and sell it online.

Writers have a huge advantage in this market because they write so easily and well. A writer can research, study, or work with experts to develop a product even outside his or her own narrow field of expertise. The products are then sold online as downloadable items. For writers who don't care about the money, it can be free. For writers who are interested in publishing their own work as a business, it can be through services like ClickBank which helps writer/publishers market their online work.

Writers have to accept that publishing is no walk in the park; it's a challenging field and online publishers need to know about the Internet as well as information publishing. But for those willing to learn and pay some dues, there is a real potential for huge rewards. In fact, this may be one of the most exciting times ever to be a writer!