[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Charbax

Niche authors are not read by anyone in the current system and are not viable business for a moms and paps small niche publishing company.

90% of my reading is niche. I support small publishing companies. Recently, that's Baen (perhaps not so small), Torqued Press, and Freya's Bower. According to your model, I should have to wade through listings of thousands of books I'm not interested in, to find the ones I want to read.

Retailers, distributors, publishers, editors must go. We all know they are completely irrelevant.

May I direct you to Fanfiction.net, where the majority of the writing has no editing, and certainly there are no pesky retailers, distributors or publishers involved?

Almost half a million Harry Potter stories alone. You may never need to read another word in print.

However, many professional authors *like* that their publishers provide these services. They don't want to do their own proofreading, nor hunt down qualified people to do it for them, so they pay a publisher a percentage of their book's income to find someone. They don't want to create & buy ads to promote their book, nor find magazines or online sites where it would be appropriate, so they pay the publisher a percentage for that, too. They don't want to format their book into book-sized pages, and choose a nice font for the chapter headers, so they pay the publisher for that. They don't want to find someone to draw a cover for them, so again...

The nice thing about Web 2.0 is that an author who wants complete control of her creation, write-edit-format-distribute, can take it. But not every author wants those hassles; if they wanted to advertise books for a living, they'd work in a sales job.

Advance payment, publicity and marketing, lawyers whatever else is also completely irrelevant with the advent of Web technologies.

Can Web technologies pay my rent while I'm waiting for my book to get popular? Does the electric company take "I'm an author, and I'm good at it, so you shouldn't charge me for six months" instead of a check?

Advance money is managed by Web 2.0 quite simply by proven track record of popularity, quality and number of fans.

Ah! So *first-time* authors need to be independently wealthy; after that, they can rest on their laurels. Authors whose quality takes a dive will get a free ride for at least one book.

And that Web 2.0 money is going to be financed through a tax that is much more efficient and which basically is the same as a global standardized subscription plan.

You still haven't said which government & banks will be managing this money, and who will be writing the regulations involved. Nor how or whether people who have no home internet will be taxed. (I know plenty of people who only get online at the library. How will you tell the difference between "person w/o computer, who does use online resources" and "person with no connection to the Web?")