My own Gutenberg press

          There is a lot to publishing a book. There is writing it, editing it, indexing it, designing it, marketing it and getting it to the customer.  I am in the final stages of writing, editing and indexing BUSTED – A Whistleblower's Guide to the War on Drugs. Doing all this has been a wonderful journey, the likes of which I recommend to everyone.
          Looking back on this process, I did most of my writing during the first two years, only then to take another full year to edit the stuff.   If you think the book is long and wordy – which I hope you don't – then you should have seen it before I reorganized it.  Just ask my friend Cindy who edited about a third of the first draft.  
          Garcon, drum roll please.  I will be publishing BUSTED – A Whistleblower's Guide to the War on Drugs on Monday.  Because it takes a couple of days after publication for Amazon to create my eCommerce page through createspace.com, I will not announce its publication until I know everything works – at least on my end. 
          My end has been filled with incredible publishing and marketing tools that the Internet gods have provided.  Earlier this week I needed a program to flip the direction of my backcover photo.  A simple search gave me probably ten different photo editors online.  Like I said... the resources for self-publishers like me are incredible.
          Ever since I read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock II, which foresaw people not needing to work outside their homes, I dreamed of having publishing tools at my fingertips.   When I went to law school we did not have the luxury of computers to do our researching and writing.  Only in the last exam of my last semester of law school did someone bring in a computer to write her final exam.  That was the beginning of the computer age in law schools.
          Similarly, twenty years ago when I wrote my first book, called Civil Obedience (about the power of turning ourselves-in en masse in order to fight prohibition policies), the expense of printing, binding, fulfillment and shipping made self-publishing books cost-prohibitive. This provided enormous power to the gatekeepers in the publishing industry, who aspiring writers like me mercilessly solicited.
          However now, the decentralization process that Toffler predicted, and the marvelous technology that companies like createspace.com provide, have empowered creators to get their books, music and film directly to people who are interested in buying them, and in a manner in which all participants are rewarded.  This means that as I was writing my book, I did not have to worry (or even think) about someone standing between me and my audience.  
          I imagine that my exhilarating feelings of empowerment and gratitude would be similar to those of Martin Luther or Erasmus had they had their own printing presses.