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Originally Posted by starrigger
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I don't know that ebooks will change the equation very much. (I hope it will, but I'm not counting on it.) You still need editors, art design, distribution, marketing, etc. ....
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As dsicussed book preparation can be done using many different models.
eBooks will lower your "barrier to entry" as I was thought in economics. The problem is we have a smaller numbers of big brands, well known authors. These get stocked in book stores and are prominently featured on Amazon. Thus you and other less known authors simply get no exposure. I never heard of you as I always went to my local bookstores and their SF shelves keep shrinking.
Now I am VERY keen on eBooks as long term I'll have access to much more content then in local Chapters store. However, just throwing a bunch of books onto a big pile offered by MobiPocket and other online stores still doesn't help me discover new authors. I use Amazon's ratings and user comments to find out what I should try, but ....
The real power of eBooks to provide a level playing field for *ALL* authors and give you a fair chance is unleashed when you have online communities that discuss, rate and recommend books *WIHTOUT* any commercial motivations. You will note that publishers have very strong commercial motivations so they don't qualify. You need a strong community of readers (this site is a beginning, but still needs to grow, to add more stuff) that can exchange ideas, recommend for/against books/authors, etc. Being open and not commercial, such communities would consider your books the same as any big selling author.
Say I am interested in cyber fiction. I may hear of few big stars in the genre from media, I may stumble upon one of his books in Chapters store, etc. I only get exposure to big starts of the genre.
Say we had a number of forums here, one for each genre. Now I can simply go to this forums and examine the recommendations. You can even assign multiple tags, like dark cyber, or techno cyber, or whatever. Using indexing engine I could quickly search huge library of recommendations and fine tune for my taste or mood. Again, so long as it is an open forum not controlled by commercial interests then all authors have the same treatment; as opposed to what publishers decide to promote, or media decides to write about.
In summary, the more obscure authors have a much better chance with eBooks to be noticed because the eBooks, WWW and other technologies have the *POTENTIAL* to promote and provide access to many more authors then any older system in the existence. Of course, whether we will exploit that potantial and realize it is another issue.