Bertram was born in Lansing, Michigan where he lived until the age of 8. In May of 1985, he moved to Okemos, Michigan; a small, and undeveloped (at the time) suburb to the east of Lansing. In 1994, he graduated from Okemos High School.

After high school, Martin held several jobs, from cashiering at a grocery store to milking cows on a dairy farm. In 1998, while living on his friend Caleb Eifert's farm, he began work on the novel which would later be called Vanity of Vanities. Later that same year, after a difficult loss, Bertram turned to Jesus Christ. This new relationship with Christ heavily influenced his continued writing of Vanity of Vanities (the title comes from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible).

At the end of the year 2000, Martin moved to Southern California. In 2001, he married Summer Nhuy, a native of Thailand who came to America at the age of 12. In 2002, they moved to Bakersfield where they now reside with their four children; Aaron, Jacob, Autumn, and Caleb. In 2004, Vanity of Vanities was finally completed, and went on to be published in February of 2006.

Bertram first discovered his love for writing in elementary school when he wrote a parody of Star Trek for a fifth grade assignment. He continued to write stories and then in 1991 he began writing content for several popular text-based online games called MUDs, the predecessor to MMORPGs. Some of the MUDs he was a part of include Hero MUD (based on the UMich campus at Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nightmare_LPMud (which was called Orlith MUD at the time), VieMUD, Realms of Imagination, and Quarantine MUD.