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Jim Thompson also wrote for money, Dostoyevsky too. Well, to survive, not to get rich.
I'm with Moejoe though, if you start treating your readers as customers, you're not writing at all. Some rich man can hire you to write on demand stories he'll find amusing.
Thompson -and a lot of others I'm sure- never thought about his readers as anything. It was the publisher that was the customer, who paid by the word. It is amazing that good books can be written this way, but maybe the desperate situation the writer was in helped. I don't think best-selling authors of today are in any kind of desperate situation to urge them to explore the depths of human psyche...
Each to his own however. There are enough (good or bad or whatever) books in the world for everyone. And always will be, I'm sure, regardless of amazon pricing policies :P
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