Sometimes I wonder.

Today marks the first day of the second year of Caleb and Linda Pirtle.

It started the way such things always do.  Two guys, in this case Caleb Pirtle and I, had a dream.

“I think eBooks are the the thing,” I told Caleb a couple of years ago when he and I first begain to talk about the project.

“E-what?” he said.

Not really, but you catch my drift.  Back in those ancient days, eBooks represented less than ten percent of the book market, and many thought they would be a flash in the pan.

It’s important to bet on the right horse.  The only thing is that as Yogi Berra said, “Predicting is hard.  Especially when it comes to the future.”

So, Caleb and his wife Linda got the ball rolling by putting their money where their dreams were and contacting Rusty Shelton in Austin, a young shining light in the book promotion business.

One of the first things Rusty told us was that we needed to be on Twitter. And we needed to blog.

Who knew?

So we starting tweeting up a storm, building a following, learning the lingo while Rusty put our site together.

Back in those days, Caleb and I had the naive notion that if you built it, people would come.  What we discovered was that building anything takes a long time and lot of work.  And once you launch an Internet site, the work has just begun. Caleb and Linda Pirtle has evolved over the last year as we have sought to stay in touch with the changes in technology, social media and the digital book business.

In the last year, Caleb and Linda Pirtle has posted over 1,300 blogs.  I’m not making this stuff up. Caleb has written the lion’s share of these with some help from me and our stable of regular bloggers.  My thanks to everyone who has taken up a laboring oar. And my thanks to our readers who stop by to read and comment. Any my special thanks to Caleb and Linda Pirtle for the herculean work they have performed.

All that work has produced a site that thousands of new people visit each month, a number that is growing by leaps and bounds.

Through VG, we have developed wonderful connections to a host of writers. My experience with them has been that to a person they are the sort of people who will go out of their way to help a fellow author, give advice, grumble a little every now and then and put their heads down and keep on ticking.

I would list the names of many of the authors who have become friends, but it would be too long for a blog like this, and I surely would leave out someone through inadvertence.

Year Two of VG will see more changes as we adapt to provide readers what they want.  We expect to begin a foray into serials, a really exciting genre that has been around for a while, but is now entering a renaissance.  We will add new bloggers with their own unique perspectives on things.

And we will dream of the days before Twitter.

Thanks to all for making Year One at VG such a success.  We’ll see you tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

httpv://youtu.be/5Ay5GqJwHF8