COMPUTERS have made publishers of us all. The traditional route to getting published was first of all to find an agent. The agent would then find a publisher.

Even if you were lucky, and they did all that and the publisher had an immediate space in their schedule, the whole process could still take years.

Instead, many people are finding it easier, quicker – and more fun – to bypass the traditional slow route and go it alone.

The democratisation of publishing. We love it.

Among recent local independently published novels are The Smile of Deceit by Bishop Auckland writer Eileen Elgey (YouWriteOn.com), a story of love and relationships and a dead body in the bath, inspired, says Eileen, by a stay in a hotel in Grange-over-Sands, Cumbria.

Devil’s Drove by Erica Yeoman (Roomtowrite, £7.99). Set in the North Tyne Valley and the Cheviots at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when a young minister takes over a new church with no congregation and gets drawn into the world of whisky smugglers and two very different women. There’s a great sense of the isolated vastness of Northumberland from Erica, a talented artist from Alnwick, who also painted her own cover design.