Authors have so many options available to them now than ever before. When it would have taken years to publish a book, now you can do it yourself much quicker without all the heartache and rejections we all receive (let's face it.... we've all been there).
Once your book is written, edited and polished, all you have to do is to epublish it on one (or various) of the many sites available like amazon, smashwords, etc and readers can be reading it in no time. Okay, we hope they'll be reading it in no time. Provided you market it as well as you possibly can, and price it competitively, you're going to get readers and if you write well and produce great stories, you'll get fans too.
I'm still waiting for my 'editors' to finish 'editing' Raven but once they are... I'll be giving this a go myself. I've got nothing to lose. I just hope that people love my book as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Especially considering the sequel is now in the works!