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The fundamental idea that the book publishing business is broken and we are going to see radical change in the business model isn't exactly new or all that startling. IMPO, Amazon and eBooks is a god send for the mid list authors, who never quite made it to the NYT's best sales list, but have enough name recognition, fans and backlist to make a good living if they are willing to put the effort into marketing themselves on the internet.
An author, or group of authors who band together and develop a vibrant online community can really do well. The problem is that online communities take a lot more work than most authors are willing to do. When the Baen community was at it's peak, it was probably the model of how to do things. Well monitored, with plenty of authors posting on a regular basis to keep interest up, plus Baen pioneered the use of snippets to generate interest in upcoming books. Most of the author sites that I've been to recently are basically fan sites where the author only shows up occasionally.
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