A classmate does a thing.
“Congratulations to John Scalzi (a classmate of mine from Webb) on getting his novel Old Man’s War bought, after publishing it on his website! I think it’s still there for the reading, or you can wait a year and shell out for it from Amazon.”
John and I overlapped at The Webb Schools in Claremont. He was a few years ahead of me. The school was small enough that you knew who people were.
Old Man’s War — which would become Scalzi’s debut novel, published by Tor in 2005, and the start of a very successful career — was written and published on his website first. That was how it got noticed: a publisher read the web version. The path from personal website to major publisher was less common in 2003 than it later became; Scalzi was one of the early demonstrations that it could work.
By the time I posted this, the book wasn’t quite out yet. “Wait a year” turned out to be accurate.
Webb was small enough to produce an interesting class of alumni: writers, scientists, filmmakers, journalists. Scalzi ending up as a Hugo Award-winning science fiction novelist seemed, at the time, like a perfectly reasonable outcome for someone who’d been writing that well in high school.