There is no point pretending that traditional publishing isn’t awesome. I’ve done it three times and it has been beyond inspiring every time. Understandably many aspiring authors are still heading in the direction of the tried and true for perfectly sensible reasons. The cache, editing, and distribution that a major publishing house can bring to your book’s table are pretty hard to dismiss.

Traditional publishing was good enough for Amanda Hocking, it’s good enough for me, and if you are like most writers, you would like to try it some time. And yet, let us not forget that all writers are publishers now. Perhaps there is no longer much point in waiting until you have a huge backlist of tomes written before you dazzle the literati in NYC. Maybe you would be better off finding some good writing momentum, running your best work through some preliminary readers, and either starting to send it out for publication or starting publishing it yourself.

Have you considered this option? I sure hope so. I am going to be saying all year that “Indie” publishing as we have come to know it (meaning we’re not with THEM, we’re INDIE) is over. There is no point digging an invisible abyss between traditional publishing and your efforts and filling it with irrational pride. The folks in traditional publishing and the folks who do indie publishing successfully, jump through pretty much all the same hoops.

Doesn’t it make a lot more sense to try and do everything publishing-wise you can in your lifetime? Sure, you have a whole lifetime to develop your author skills, but maybe you’d like to attempt some reasonable publishing goals sooner rather than later. Having worked with several micro-publishers this past year, I have noticed that personal empowerment earned via micro-publishing is powerful. It’s like a gateway drug to authorhood. I can practically feel the gleam in my students’ eyes as they start jonesing to micro-publish again, and again, and again.

They’ve got the bug, and they must, they will publish again. So long as you can engage in the process of micro-publishing with your full focus on your readers rather than wasting an iota of energy on who you are flipping off over in the traditional publishing camp (those are your future peeps, remember!), you can make huge strides in your writing career this year, simply by committing to micro-publishing something short and significant within your repertoire before this year concludes.