Becoming an author is a deeply cherished dream that for thousands of writers dies slowly under the accumulating weight of form rejection letters, unanswered phone calls and the mounting realization that commercial publishing is a tough, money-oriented business. But just as Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of moveable type and the printing press made books widely available, new technology called print-on-demand (POD) is upending the publishing industry and enabling anyone who wants to be an author to be one.

With POD, the raw materials of books—words, pictures, pages, covers, etc.—are stored as digital files on computers until someone orders a book, usually over the Internet. Then, using high-speed, short-run presses, the book is immediately printed and sent directly to the buyer. A book that did not exist on Monday can be delivered on Wednesday. An electronic or e-book can be delivered in minutes to digital reading devices such as Amazon’s hugely successful Kindle.

POD books are essentially indistinguishable from traditionally printed books in both quality and price. As a result, the old math of commercial publishing, which required large print runs to bring per-unit costs down, is vanishing—along with the need to inventory books and sell them at bookstores, which are closing throughout the United States.

Something else is also happening. By the thousands, authors are simply bypassing old-line publishing houses and bringing their books directly into the marketplace. In 2008, more than 285,000 book titles were produced using POD, short-run and other techniques, according to BowkerAE, a 137-year-old bibliographic company that is the primary source for publishing industry statistics. That number was more than double the 2007 total and more than 12 times that of 2006. Conventional publishers, by contrast, produced 275,232 book titles in 2008, down 3 percent from 2007.

“Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point in which on-demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace,” says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publisher services for Bowker.

“For 6,000 years, publishers of one kind or another have been making content available to people, but access has been limited—you had to go somewhere like a church or library or bricks-and-mortar bookstore in order to get to it,” Gallagher says. “Today, all bets are off because you’ve got the Internet where you can buy a book in bed and that can be a traditional print book from Amazon, or it can be something you read on an electronic reader, or even on your cell phone. If you look up the definition of the word ‘publish’ in Webster’s, it says ‘to make generally known.’ It doesn’t say anything about paper. We are entering into a whole new age of publishing.”

Self-publishing itself is not new. Bestsellers such as Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles, In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr., and Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen are just some of the books originally published and peddled by their optimistic authors. In addition, there have always been “vanity publishers” who would produce almost anything written. However, their upfront fees, which typically ran into thousands of dollars, dissuaded most would-be authors. What’s new is POD, which has changed the game so that almost anyone can be an author—and thousands of people now are.

In the new age, writers are turning to companies like AuthorHouse, a 13-year-old company that has helped more than 40,000 writers self-publish more than 60,000 books; Lulu, which helps creators of books, e-books, CDs, videos, and other material produce, market and sell their work; and CreateSpace, Amazon’s self-publishing division. All offer self-publishing packages starting at a couple hundred dollars—authors can add marketing, Web sites and publicity for additional fees—and all are seeing strong growth in their businesses. Here are some of their authors and their stories:

Dan Spencer
For sheer persistence, it’s hard to top Dan Spencer, who has self-published five novels (www.danspencer.com) that have won critical praise but a limited audience. He’s been at it for some 10 years.

“I’m kind of an early adopter of all kinds of things and I figured it was better to at least put my book out there than let it sit and collect digital dust on my computer,” says Spencer, who typesets his own books and creates the covers. “It’s the same thing as an indie rock band putting out their own CD and trying to build an audience.”

Spencer focuses on historical fiction, writing late into the night after he gets home from work, and makes the books he creates on Lulu available in print and on Kindle.

“I really get the most pleasure out of the writing,” he says. “What happens afterwards is pretty much out of my hands. You can market your books, but you can’t make people read them. But I’m still hopeful of breaking out and getting a traditional publisher. I liken self-publishing to minor league baseball. Nobody wants to stay in the minors—they all want to go to the majors and the World Series.”

Doug Wojcieszak
When his brother died after a medical error in an Ohio hospital, Doug Wojcieszak founded a nonprofit group called the Sorry Works! Coalition (www.sorryworks.net) and later used AuthorHouse to publish a book called Sorry Works! The coalition encourages health care providers and their insurers to apologize and offer compensation if an analysis shows that an error took place or a standard of care wasn’t met.

“It was a cause that turned into a business,” Wojcieszak explains. “We were putting out a newsletter and giving a lot of presentations when the idea for the book came up.”

Wojcieszak considered conventional publishers but changed his mind after learning what was involved.

“It would have taken a minimum of 24 months from the moment we got an editor to say ‘yes’ until a book hit the street,” he says. “At that point, we might get a couple of dollars for each book sold. In other words, you work your butt off, have to deal with some other person’s opinions and then they take most of the money. No thanks. With AuthorHouse, once we got a finished document in their hands, we had a book 30 days later. We’ve now sold well north of 10,000 copies and the book is a revenue center for us. The big thing, though, is that we had an important message that we wanted to get out there.”

Lisa Genova
The success story every author dreams of really happened to Lisa Genova, who went from peddling her book out of her car to having a bestseller and seven-figure deal for her next two books. An actress and writer with a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard University, Genova was moved to write a book while helping her grandmother deal with Alzheimer’s disease in 2004.

“Everything I read about Alzheimer’s was written by a clinician or caregiver, but l am a neuroscientist and I was fascinated with what was going on inside my grandmother’s head,” she says. “I kept asking myself, ‘What does it feel like to have this?’ ”

Genova decided to write a novel about a woman who has Alzheimer’s, from the woman’s point of view, as the disease progresses. The result was Still Alice—and nobody wanted it.

“I sent out about 100 letters to agents and I’m still waiting to hear back from most of them—when I did get an answer it was ‘No’ in a form letter,” she says. Undaunted, Genova sent the unpublished manuscript to the national Alzheimer’s Association, which loved it and offered to help promote the book.

“That was the first time anyone not related to me liked the book and the first concrete reason I got behind the idea of self-publishing,” she says. Genova published through iUniverse and began selling her book as best she could. Then Still Alice got a highly favorable review from a Boston newspaper and things started happening. Genova got an agent, a big publishing house bought the book and put its marketing muscle behind it—and the world changed. Still Alice is in its 17th printing, has sold a half-million copies as a trade paperback and the publisher is printing a million copies of the mass-market edition.

“It’s still surreal,” says Genova, “and how much fun is that?”

Elisa Lorello
If there’s a writer who exemplifies publishing’s new paradigm, it may be Elisa Lorello, who uses a self-built Web site (www.elisalorello.com), social networking, e-books and aggressive pricing to build a fan base for her racy novels.

Lorello knew how to write—she has a Master’s degree in professional writing and teaches academic writing at North Carolina State University—but that didn’t do her any good with her first novel, Faking It. After 60 rejection letters, she decided to give Lulu.com a try.

“I believed there was an audience for my novel—I believed it was worthy and I was proud of it,” she says. “And I think I just got in at the right time, when social networking really started to play a huge role in self-publishing. I went on a lot of discussion forums where we weren’t talking about books, and people got to know me and then I’d mention, ‘By the way, I’m an author.’ That’s what got the ball rolling.”

Faking It sold modestly in print but took off when Lorello made it available on Kindle.

“I priced it at $1.99 and it did fairly well and then I lowered the price to 99 cents and got a lot of sales,” she says. “A lot of independent authors are doing that because readers will give it a shot because there’s no risk. If they don’t like it, they’re only out a buck. Right now my interest is in attracting readers more than in royalties.”

Lorello’s second novel, Ordinary World, has sold well and she’s working on a third. No mainstream publishers have come calling, but she doesn’t feel like a second-class author.

“We can no longer stigmatize people and say, ‘Oh, well you’re self-published because you couldn’t get a traditional publisher,’ ” she says. “That’s just not the case any more. It doesn’t matter where the book came from—if it’s good, it’s good.”

Andy and Bernice Tate
Getting children interested in reading has been a lifelong mission for Andy and Bernice Tate—and they’re busier than ever.

“After we retired, we said, ‘Now what?’ and it was a natural transition into creating illustrated storybooks for kids,” Andy says. “We wanted to put easy-to-read original storybooks into the lives of children so they would get started reading at an early age.”

The Tates’ first effort was The Wormleys, a picture book adapted from a lullaby Bernice had written, with a storyline that helps children understand that it’s OK to be different. They contacted conventional publishers but weren’t happy with what they found.

“We ran into a wall of red tape of resistance and confusion—it’s almost like a share-cropping system the publishers have in terms of owning your content,” Andy says. “So we started looking around on the Web and we found AuthorHouse, and pretty quick all of the things that were a mystery to us just totally evaporated.”

The Tates published The Wormleys in 2007 and began selling it on their Web site, www.storybooks4kids.com. What the Elephant Forgot, which has an anti-bullying message, was next and two other books have followed. Reviews have been very favorable and the Tates have received widespread media coverage.

“It’s a mission that turned into something a lot larger than what we ever imagined,” Bernice says. “We’re not making a lot of profit, but we are able to sustain our projects and that’s what matters to us.”

Reg Green
After their 7-year-old son Nicholas was killed in Italy in 1994 during an attempted robbery, Reg and Maggie Green decided to donate his organs and corneas to seven patients waiting for transplants. Their compassion, which saved four lives and profoundly improved three others, captured the imagination of Italians, who have since responded by quadrupling their commitment to organ donations.

A veteran journalist, Reg Green (www.nicholasgreen.org) wrote a book called The Nicholas Effect about his son’s story, which was published in 1999 and sold more than 40,000 copies. When he wrote a second book, The Gift That Heals, which tells the stories of 42 transplant patients, Green thought agents and publishers would recognize the appeal of the theme.

“I got either no replies or very dismissive replies,” he says. “So after not getting anywhere, we thought, ‘What about trying it on our own?’ We honed in on AuthorHouse and the book was ready about 30 days after we submitted the manuscript. That was 2008, and The Gift That Heals sold more copies to the public that year than any of their other titles.”

Now on the far side of 80, Green has become a tireless advocate for organ transplantation, spurred by the knowledge that 18 people die every day in the United States alone while waiting for organs that could save them. Here is what he has written about his efforts:

“In the past 10 years I’ve met hundreds more donor families and even in places...such as India or Venezuela or Japan, I can scarcely remember one who regretted the decision. In fact, the opposite is true. It is people who didn’t donate who say, with tears in their eyes, ‘I wish I had done it.’ ”

Steve Fox is a freelance writer, former newspaper publisher and reporter based in Ventura, California.