I have a friend who has been a writer since we were old enough to say the word writer. It is what he has always wanted to do and talent – along with a significant helping of self-fulfilling prophecy, no doubt – propelled him into his career as a published author of over a dozen books of fiction. Looking from the outside in it surely looks as though he just decided one day to do what he does for a living, sat down and wrote until he was done, picked up the phone and called all the area book publishers at which time he said, “I’ve finished! When do you want to pick it up?”

This, of course, is not the way that it went; and while he never had any doubt about what he wanted to do and never strayed from his objective of making it his career he still hit roadblocks just like everyone else. In fact, his first job out of school was at a newspaper where he was relegated to writing small blurbs of ad copy, which of course did not thrill him in the slightest; and during this time he began his first book. It took him two years to write it and when he was done he was absolutely clueless about what to do next. He had some ins in the book publishing world considering his job but most book publishers were not inclined to talk to him considering that he had not been able to as of yet acquire a literary agent.

After about a year of the drama of trying to find a literary agent who would represent an unpublished author or a book publisher that would publish an unrepresented author my friend finally turned to self publishing methods through which he was able to print his first book. The book got so much buzz that before long one of the larger book publishers offered to buy the rights and reprint it at much larger quantities. The rest is history.

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