Be the Monkey - Ebooks and Self-Publishing: A Dialog Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath

Making a standard trade deal means the author will get broader distribution, but the price of the book will go up to the consumer (costing sales) and the share of the price that goes to the author will diminish sharply. Nonetheless, some authors find self-publishing a path to finding a publisher and, for many, the trade-off of greater exposure and

One is that Amazon very early persuaded Wall Street to look at them and value them with different standards from those they applied to all other companies. That is, Amazon said, “We are going for building up our customer base and our market share, and, by doing that, building the engine that will deliver profits in the future,”

On the digital side, for the last three or four years at least, Amazon’s e-book sales growth has been almost entirely driven by lower-cost titles from self-published ‘indie’ authors, digital-first presses, and Amazon’s own in-house publishing imprints. The more established publishers have seen very little of that e-book growth; the industry’s large

With the benefit of hindsight, we can identify at least four substantial differences between Amazon’s approach to e-books and the prior efforts from tech giants Palm, Microsoft, and Sony and a whole slew of start-ups that had tried to make what seemed like an obvious business work for over a decade without very much success.