Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
I think I actually like it better when buy-direct single authors don't bother with the attempted storefront software* and just have something set up so that you drop your money into their Paypal tipjar or whatever with a note about what you're buying and the author or their fanboy assistant or whatever just emails you the books directly as an attachment (or has some sort of auto-Paypal add-to-cart button thing set up to do so, which I've seen a couple of authors do).
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I have bought from one or two of these authors, but it's a big pain in the you-know-where. Yes, I saved money, and the author presumably got the entire proceeds, but it's all word of mouth, and you have to know of the author, know of the website and trust the website. If most authors followed this route, they'd starve to death.
I just had an email conversation with an author who had recently put up a Kindle edition of his short story collection. I asked him if he had an epub edition, and he does not. He said that if he had time, he might convert it and sell the epub edition on his website. Bad, bad, idea. The reason why I went to his website in the first place was because I wanted to ask him about an epub edition because I was pretty sure there wasn't one, and I'm tired of the Amazon exclusivity. Granted, Amazon gives you 75% of the ebook reading population, and you probably have to work with at least 3 different retailers (assuming Sony and Kobo support self-publishing), so it's much easier to do only Amazon and get a big audience. If you don't have a Kindle, and you don't want to (strip DRM and) convert to epub, and you can't find it at one of the bigger ebook retailers, you'll probably just give up and go to another author before ever thinking of checking to see if the author has her own website and finding the epub there.