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Originally Posted by neilmarr
I'm sorry that you're taken in by Amazon, Koland. It is not by any stretch of the imagination a 'publisher'. It provides a retail platform only and offers zero editorial, design or promotional input in its GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) system.
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Not assuming much there, are you?
As for what they "provide" as a publisher - for the average author (not the Grishams of the world or the instant reality show celebrities), they provide about the same as a traditional publisher ... nothing. Even with big names these days, it's obvious that publishers no longer do much, if any, editing and no proofing before hitting the print key at the presses. They no longer read new manuscripts that are sent in unsolicited, without a publicist/agent (paid by the author); one recent story claimed that even at a publisher with a slush pile, they had not printed anything form it since 1991 and most will do what I do with unsolicited resumes - shred them, unread, and not respond to them in any way.
Authors are expected to present a formatted, ready to print manuscript in electronic format to their publisher, just as with Amazon (or Mobipocket or Smashwords, etc). And then do their own publicity, in most cases. That doesn't make their publishers any less of a publisher (and some of them are selling retail direct to customers, as well, just not as successfully).
It's true that some publishers do more. Then again, so does Amazon for a very, very small set of "their" authors (an extremely small subset). The biggest drawback of Amazon as a publisher is that you end up in only one retail store (albeit one that is selling 90% of all ebooks worldwide, for the moment). Choosing Mobipocket might give you "larger" coverage, but much smaller sales; the same can be said of many of the other avenues.
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If the term 'publisher' must now be used so loosely as to include packagers and retailers, Koland, let me ask you this: If your local supermarket sells you a can of carrots from its shelves with its own logo on the wrapper does that make the shop a farm and the manager a farmer?
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Since most of what they sell as "organic" is shipped around the world (and treated with who knows what, in order to be allowed inside out borders at the shipyards; at least it isn't supposed to be a lethal as what clothing is fumigated with before entry) and "local" might mean anywhere on the same coast, they might as well claim it as their own. Not that it has anything to do with publishing.
You can use Amazon and choose a different publisher. Smashwords is one; unfortunately, in order to provide all their formats, they have chose to accept one document and convert it, but not a very good ebook format source was chosen, so the Kindle (or mobi on their site) version looks much worse that what you could otherwise be selling in their store. Mobipocket is another, with it's own drawbacks (one format, for one). And there are some small publishers created by small groups of authors, who then deal with Amazon as a group - these may potentially be a better fit.
However, getting 25% of a paperback vs 35% on an ebook may strike you as "unfair", for many of the authors with Amazon DTP, their sales in paper can be counted on one hand per month (if not per year) and their ebook sales may only be slightly better. Unless, of course, they get just the right publicity and see sales hit triple digits per day; get high enough into the bestseller list of your category and that success multiplies, simply because your book can be seen in the default searches at Amazon. For most of these authors, getting a larger cut through a publisher that gives them essentially no market isn't an improvement. Nor is using pricing similar to paperback (let alone any of the vanity press/trade paperback pricing you see many try for), for an unknown author (and for you to be using DTP, you fit into this category, for the most part, or you could grab up that large house publishing contract and get the "higher" cut you seem to think comes with that).
Going it alone may give you a bigger percentage, but it doesn't provide more income.