So a 12-year old kid just won a short story competition.

Jake Tomlinson's The Cannibal's Kitchen was, as the judges say, "a very clever tale with an unexpected twist at the end". Oh, "and rather gruesome too.”

He beat out a slew of other competitors with just as much talent but not nearly as much baby fat, proving once again that baby fat gives you an edge.

Way to knock it out of the park, Jake!

The Cannibal's Kitchen has yet to yield any search results, but it wouldn't come as a surprise if Jake was currently considering publishing it.

Today, the youngest and brightest writers have resources at their disposal to turn them into bestselling authors overnight. Thanks to websites like Lulu and Createspace, self-publishing to digital and hardcover platforms is a real option for anyone looking to get their work on the market--and a higher grossing option, at that. Additionally, crowdsourced publishing is also taking flight.

You may not have heard of that last one. Crowdsourced publishing is a fancy term for readers paying for a book before it comes out, much like publishers give authors advances on their manuscripts. The author pitches their story to the audience on a site like Pubslush, Unbound, or even good-old Kickstarter, and if the readers like it, they pay the author to write it and get it into their hands.

Some believe this is a better option to self-publishing because it weeds out poor and unpolished literary works. There's no doubt that with the advent of self-publishing, subpar stories have been on the rise; it's the natural consequence of removing the gatekeepers. And crowdsourcing publishing has yielded some spectacular results.

But, while it remains to be seen whether crowdsourcing is truly the solution to this creative pandemic, I would argue that crowdsourcing weeds out works that may become unpopular, not necessarily what is or isn't quality.

Readers have been known to make such strange choices.

Consequently, this means self-publishing is still the easier option for young and aspiring authors such as Jake Tomlinson. And he wouldn't be the only young author to have self-published his story successfully.

A few months ago, News 12 Brooklyn reported that a 14-year old Latino boy had self-published his own sci-fi novel, which received some pretty solid reviews on Amazon. More recently, eight adolescents from Philadelphia (aged 10 to 12) successfully self-published a book called "Listen to Our Voices", which conveys the dreams, goals, and everyday issues of ethnic children in their own words.

Children are great storytellers. Their imaginations know no limits, and hence, their stories have limitless potential. As more of these success stories of young authors start to crop up, we may one day find ourselves asking: why did we ever find this unusual?