“It used to be called, simply, vanity publishing,” a good friend said to me, recently. She is more than just a friend, she’s the kind of good friend who tells you the truth, not always what we want to hear.

I’ve made some wonderful friends as a writer in the WordPress.com community. Although I’ve written a few ‘Amazon books’ as well, I’m not going to talk about them, here. This is for something far more important: a personal vision of the future and the content of self-publishing.

We can easily overlook the fact that WordPress is a self-publishing mechanism, as well as a blogging world and enabler of websites. We think of the vast machine that is Amazon books or ebooks as the dominant mechanism for getting from idea to ‘print’, although Amazon’s genius was to offer an international print-on-demand machine from which the majority of its writers –…