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What authors *don't* need now is an organization that puts them in touch with agents & publishers in other countries; they have Facebook for that. They don't need an organization that tells them they should be happy with 3% royalty payments because they're getting so many readers. (Funny, when the darknet people say that readers are more important than payments, that's supposedly a bad thing. When heads of literary agencies say it, it's being supportive of authors' careers.) They don't need "bestseller lists" that ignore anything not printed by the truckload so they fail to notice what's *actually* selling best.
There's plenty of room for individuals & organizations to have careers supporting authors--but they need to be supporting author's in today's world, not
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That's some list of straw men you have there. What does the Author's Guild have to do with any of that? Scott Turow's "crime" on this forum is that hesides with the publishers in seeing Amazon regain monopsonistic control of ebook market as a threat. He is right to do so, IMO. With Amazon in control, everyone upstream of Amazon will have to negotiate with a buyer of their product that can say, "Either you sell to me on my terms or you get locked out of 80-90 per cent of the market."
Well, authors are upstream of Amazon and they will feel the squeeze just the same, whether they are BPH authors or those plucky little independents you like so much. Those indies are even more at Amazon's mercy than the BPH authors, since Amazon can bury their rankings with a mere nudge of their ranking algorithms.
IMO, Scott Thurow (who is not merely the head of the Author's Guild but an attorney), knows a lot more about the cold , hard reality of business negotiations than folks here are so enamored of the wonderful possibilities of THE INTERNETT!!