E-book only publishing makes no sense to me. The one thing a mainstream publisher can offer that no-one else can is the ability to put your book in n thousand bookstores - you basically get your chance to be discovered. (Yes, the prize for being making that 1 in 100 chance to be published is you get a 1 in 100 chance to be popular with a large number of readers. Reason #1137 why I would never be a writer.)
If your publisher isn’t offering that, then you might as well publish it yourself and make 10x the royalties (70% vs 6%).
Still, I figure that if e-book publishing really takes off and the conventional publishers die, Amazon will get rich by demanding $5 or $10K to have your book show up under anything other than a direct search by title or author name.
After all, there’s no reason for them not to make money off both readers and writers, and there are good number of people who would easily spend that to give their book a chance. After all, it’s pretty small potatoes after spending $40K on a Master’s of Creative Writing to spend another $5-$10K making certain your opus gets the recognition it deserves.
After all, once there are no more bookstores, that’ll be pretty much only one way for unknown authors to get their books under readers noses in large numbers… Amazon.
