[sirbruce]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

5,000 copies per week funded by million dollar advertising and promotional campaigns. Of course no indie-publisher is going to achieve those kinds of figures, but that was never the point. And better off is subjective. If you must insist on measuring this in monetary terms, then you are right, they probably won't be better off.

Okay, but that's what I'm addressing. Dreams asked:

So, if I've understood this correctly... wouldn't an author earn much more by selling from their own site? Sell at $5 internationally and it is pure profit? (sell only 2,000 ebooks @ $5 would be $10,000)

And the answer is, no, you probably won't earn much more by selling on your own site if you're a relative unknown. Because 2,000 ebooks might be all you sell on your own site, whereas if you could get the same book published you could sell 10 times that many with marketing and a physical retail presence. And remember, some of those sales are probably going to be hardback, at prices you can't get from your ebook. Then comes the greater publicity and the possibility of ancillary rights.

You responded:

If you only sold 100x$5 and you released 2 books a year, you'd still be ahead of the game money-wise and probably less stressed out.

And I'm saying no, you won't be "ahead of the game money-wise" as you claimed, because you're going to earn more than $1,000 a year in royalties (or get more than that in the advance) from your physical book unless it does very poorly.

Now, if you're a very popular author, you could probably do very well financially with just ebooks, since so many people would buy them. But it would still be far less people than those who buy physical copies. Certainly the growing popularity of ebooks, and the shrinking sales of pbooks, is making a self-published ebook author increasingly viable, but it's not equivalent to being professionally published yet.

If money is the motivator behind writing then why write?

The issue isn't whether or not you can make enough money to make a living, the issues is whether or not you can make enough money for it to be worth your time. If you want to write for free, go ahead; I myself recognize there is value in my time so I want to be compensated as best I can for it in a manner I find enjoyable.

So that's the choice writers face, a choice they might never have had before. Do they want to be a product? Do they want to bend and twist under the whim of some corporate gatekeeper with dollar signs in their eyes in the slim to nonexistent hopes of making a living out of all this? Or they can do what they want, when they want and how they want.

Sure, but now you're arguing something completely different. You're saying money doesn't matter, because you've got more freedom to express yourself. Certainly, but if no one is around to hear the lion roar, is anyone afraid? In any case, that's basically admitting that self-publishing ebooks pays less, but it shouldn't matter because you shouldn't care about the money. All I'm saying is, for those who DO care about the money, old-fashioned publishing will still get you more money than self-publishing ebooks only, *if* you can actually get someone to publish it.