Amazon to Cut E-Book Prices, Shaking Rivals (making Amazon a Monopoly)

[kentauros]

101. So, as an aspiring author,

I'm supposed to just go with the industry model in order to support brick & mortar stores with physical books? Why?

Why would I purposely hand over the majority of my potential income (70% royalties versus a maximum of 17.5%) to people that live and work in New York City when I could have more money to spend locally? And before anyone can point to that question and say that I'm in the wrong party, let me state a few things here.

As a Democrat, am I supposed to make less money than a republican in the same field? Am I supposed to live in poverty in order to be a "good Democrat"? What's so bad about me making a good living for myself? You do realize that if I can make more money with eBooks than print books that I'll have more money to give to Democratic candidates, right?

How about the fact that physical books are far less environmentally correct than eBooks? No fuel needed to cut down the trees, no fuel needed to ship the logs to the paper process, no fossil fuels needed to power that paper plant, no fuel needed to carry the finished paper to the printer, no fossil fuels (or nuclear) needed to run the printer, no fuel needed to ship the finished product to warehouses and no fuel needed to ship the finished product to brick & mortar stores, not to mention the potential fuel you use to drive there. And yes, physical electronic readers require fuel and energy to produce, store, ship and deliver, but once it's done, that's it. All books are delivered electronically, and my guess would be for far less total energy than physical books over the life of each.

When I publish my book (fiction, once I finish writing the dammed thing! ) it will be in eBook format only. I'll publish through Amazon, and if I feel the need to self-publish through a website later, once I've established a fan-base, then I'll go with that and bypass Amazon entirely. They make a great place to start, but I don't have to remain with them, unlike with a legacy publisher.

I'd rather make a decent living self-publishing, than to have a book series barely supported by a legacy publisher and still have to work a "day job" for a republican in my current field of oil & gas drafting. What's so bad about that?

By the way, I highly recommend this blog for those that want to research this subject further: Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing