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Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush
But I would argue that market forces are doing precisely the opposite. By destroying the small publishers and enslaving everything to market forces. Amazons only criteria is that you sell. In order for unique voices to be heard it always required unique publishers with taste who were wiling to raise that author on a platform for all to see no matter the risk. Now its harder to educate people and fight through the noise to see the great.
For instance, an innocent peruser of the Amazon library may come across an edition of 'Moan for Bigfoot' by Virginia Wade, and find their choice validated by the like minded. And amazon will happily take your money. So will Virginia Wade for that matter. Of course Virginia wouldn't exist without Amazon and Bigfoot would never have crawled out of the forest without such support.
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Small publishers always have had a hard time of it, but Carina Press is still out there, Samhain, Angry Robot and so on. Baen is still out there and is an independent mid-sized publisher...let's see. Bell Bridge is still out there, so is Mysterious Press...
So there are self-pub'd books available for sale on major retailers...that impacts readers who are interested and also impacts self-published authors. I suppose a reader may accidentally buy a book by a self-pub'd author now and then. But I doubt that such an accident causes a huge uproar. It's fairly easy to avoid self-pub'd works if you care that much. Does it take sales away from trad published authors? Probably. But that is only going to happen if the self-pub'd books continue to find an audience.
Trying to define the word author as a way to exclude self-published authors isn't going to help traditional authors. The genie is out of the bottle. And as it ever was, the ONLY way to gain and keep an audience is to write more books and hope they find an audience.