Three years ago, a couple of forces came to bear on me at the same time and I found myself unexpectedly playing with the idea of writing an eBook. I was on a hike with Corwin, my manager and best friend, and I remember asking him, "Hey, what do you think about me doing an eBook?" It was a vague idea at best, but I went home and, determined to learn Adobe InDesign, I sat down and began working on a short project I was calling, for lack of a better name, "Ten Ways to Improve Your Photography Without Buying Gear." That book just became known as TEN, because, well, it's a shorter title and it has brevity, if not wit, going for it. I put it up online as a $10 PDF that I would sell for $5 for a limited time. To my great shock people downloaded it. Over and over again. I did another one, cleverly called TEN MORE. And still people downloaded it. I never could bring myself to raise the prices; they're still just $5 each.

When I first hit the Publish button there was nothing in the world that could have prepared me for the response. Three years later we've had well over a quarter million downloads, 43 digital books in the library, and by the end of 2013 will have 17 authors under this accidental publishing umbrella. I still wake up every day and shake my head, partly from disbelief, but mostly from gratitude. I've stumbled headlong into a creative project that I love, and one that's provided for me and a growing team of photographers, layout artists, and editors. When I fell from the wall in Italy and could no longer take assignment work, I had something that kept me going, and paid the bills. We're a small company that's learning as we go, but even the failed experiments and harder lessons have been so worthwhile.

So today we're celebrating our first three years. We're doing that by announcing a few exciting changes, and then we're going to give away a few things, and offer a great discount just to say thank you.

- David duChemin