I am a reasonably well-known military historian with forty books to my credit. I started out at age fifteen and have been at it for nearly fifty years. I ran my own advertising agency until the early 1980s, when I was finally able to support myself solely as a writer. I used technical, promotional, marketing, and business skills learned during my advertising career to make the leap into self-publishing in 1985, when the only way to bring back a book caught in a publisher bankruptcy was to do it myself. That started a dual career as a published and self-published author until I got fed up with the “mainstream” publishing world in 1992 and went into my own publishing business full time. I ran that business successfully until 2001, when I cashed out and went to work for a few years as an in-house acquisitions and line editor. Since 2004, I have had ten pictorials published by another house, but I have since rekindled my imprint (Pacifica Military History) and placed every narrative I can–29–in print via POD or, in a few cases, eBook only. I also help a few author buddies keep their out-of-print books in print and have reissued, as PODs, a few books for authors I published when I was running everything offset. I am in the process (January 2010) of self-publishing my first novel, Love and Grace. It’s up on Kindle, being prepared for Sony, and will soon be published in a POD edition. My last military book, a pictorial, will be out in March 2010. After that, it’ll all be fiction, if I can muster the ambition.