Founder-led,because your first bookis personal.

My first self-published book came out in 1987, and honestly, I didn't really know what I was doing.

It was a planner for musicians. I'd been a working guitarist for years, so music was the world I knew, and that's why my early books were all for musicians. I'd also been a graphic artist since the '70s, back before desktop computers.

In 1987 there were typesetting companies with big machines that set your text one line at a time. I took my pages there, cut the lines out with an X-Acto knife, and stuck them down with hot wax. That's where "cut and paste" on your computer comes from. We really did cut, and we really did paste. When the Mac came along, those typesetting shops disappeared almost overnight. A local printer ran my pages. The bindery I found was about 150 miles away, so I drove there, and they bound 300 books for me the same day.

I never saw it as a book to read. It was a tool, something a musician would use every day. So I had a local plastics company make plexiglass holders in a special shape, and a sign company cut the title out of vinyl, just like it looked on the cover. Now it was a countertop display. I took it to a popular music store, and they put several dozen copies right on the front counter.

About two weeks later, on a Sunday morning, my phone rang. It was a jobber who sold to bookstores across four surrounding states, and he wanted six dozen more. The music store had sold out. That's when I knew I had something.

By 1993 I'd gotten pretty good with computers, so I rebuilt that planner from scratch. I sent it to Mel Bay, and a couple of weeks later I had a contract. They wanted it out fast. A couple of months later, The New One Year Working Musician's Organizer was introduced at the NAMM show in Anaheim, California.

In 1996 came Build and Manage Your Music Career with MixBooks, and later ArtistPro. I wrote Gigorama, business software for musicians, and negotiated a licensing deal for that too. Years later I became president of Oklahoma City Writers, one of the city's oldest writers' groups, founded in 1914.

I never planned on a life in publishing. It just kind of happened.

I'd been a graphic artist for decades. When my daughter started writing a book series, I saw how much she was spending on cover artists, so I offered to design them myself. That pulled me in. After a while, people started coming to me with questions about their own books. I already had the business mind and the design eye. Books just felt more special to me than business cards and flyers.

So here's what I tell every author I sit down with: Your words matter. A lot of people talk themselves down and think their story doesn't mean anything. It does. When you hold your finished book, you've proven you can finish something, and now you have a tool. Some of our authors speak with theirs, teach with them, or build a business around them. Watching someone feel that is the best part of what I do.