The technology of writing has changed more than I can believe in the nearly 40 years I have been a professional writer. I am thinking now of the process of publishing on the Internet. Back in the day it could take months or years to publish a book. Now, once your book is formatted, you fill out some forms online and within a few hours your book is available. I recently needed to change one of my covers. It used to take forever to choose a cover and to have the available art completed. This time I got in touch with a friend who is a graphic artist and explained what I needed. He told me where I might look for images, I found an image, I told him what I wanted, and within a couple of hours he had a cover for me to look at. I asked for a couple of changes, he made some tweaks, and voila! I had a cover. I put it on Kindle and within 3 hours it was available.
Of course, before I got to the publication stage I had spent many, many hours revising my manuscript. I also had many readers look at it. Some were professional editors. This is one of the main problems with the self-published books. Many if not most are insufficiently edited. I believe that eventually the better written and better edited books will prevail in the marketplace. For now it is fun and exciting just to be a part of the process.
