publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the re

When publishers invented the agency model of e-book pricing (discussed above and in Chapter 5), they put down a marker, which was that they wanted to get 70 percent of what the consumer spent on e-books. Amazon took the same number as their new royalty basis for self-published authors. Upload your e-book to them, follow certain pricing and other gu

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Suddenly, every bestseller had competition with the copies of the same book that had sold last week or last month. The more copies it sold, the more used books could follow it into the marketplace. That meant that all the books—including books newly on the bestseller list—had used copies available at a substantial discount from the new book price.

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