[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by greencat

On the ethics of Amazon. I fairly quickly found this piece on their treatment of casuals:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle5337770.ece

Frankly I don't know of any other company operating in the UK that penalises you for being sick with a Doctor's note. And this piece on union busting behaviour:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006.../careers.work2

Umm, you get five sick days under their scheme. Which isn't bad for workers hired for two months or so.

(I'm also a little skeptical of this argument because of the emphasis it kept putting on "heavy" x-box consoles. I have an x-box. I wouldn't really describe it as heavy).

The union bit barely mentioned Amazon and didn't seem to say much beyond the fact that management asked its workers to vote against the union.

I'm not suggesting that. I'd say keep Amazon but diversify your sources of income (and I see from his blog etc that Konrath does this). List your book in other places/other other services/sell merchandise and books from your own site.

My own solution is not to give up the day job.

Diversifying is good - my only point was that, as a practical matter, it may be hard to avoid actually having Amazon account for the vast majority of your sales.

Amazon sets a minimum price of 99c although others like Smashwords let you list for free. It's a lot way off but I think the real competition will come in 20+ years when computers become as good (if not better) than humans at producing stories with mass appeal.

Computers will never produce stories with mass appeal; they don't seem to work that way.