Yes, as you correctly point out, the economics behind that royalty structure became obsolete when the ebook came around. The new thing was the low unit costs. The other new thing was channel economics. The latter triumphed and gave Amazon the bargaining power they needed to make sure that none of the economic advantage of e-books would find their way into creators' pockets. That is what I'm lamenting.

And discounting generally. New book sales used to be pretty much a list price operation. Publishers did a lot more gatekeeping and tended to provide more services for the authors they selected.

I've gone both the indie route and the traditional publisher route and I'm honestly not sure the publisher is worth the other tradeoffs. TBH, the biggest value of the publisher was that it still carries a certain (not entirely warranted) gravitas.

Editing is still valuable, judging by the writing quality of self-published books.

You can hire someone to do that though--along with cover design etc. And publishers often don't do an awful lot of heavy editing in my experience.

(I'd argue that if you're doing a book by yourself without a co-author, you pretty much have to hire at least a copy editor but that's pretty inexpensive.)

As the partner of a copy editor, I'm intrigued you think this is inexpensive, because she's been doing this for years for PhD and scientific papers, and the book she did took a lot longer and cost several thousand dollars at her below market rate. Admittedly it was for an english as a second language author, but my observation is that for a work of any significant length, copy editing is not cheap. For a self published book, it might exceed the revenue: you'd have to sell thousands of copies to recoup the copy edit cost.

I guess I write fairly well; I'm a professional writer by most definitions. By copy editor I mean someone who mostly just fixes spelling and grammatical errors--and maybe flags stuff that doesn't make sense. When I hired a copy editor for a book, I paid a few hundred dollars to someone who had interned for a magazine editor friend of mine.

I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.

Well, I think you're right about needing a fresh pair of eyes. And, as a pro writer you probably made less mistakes than most.

You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.

A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...

> You can hire someone to do that though--along with cover design etc. And publishers often don't do an awful lot of heavy editing in my experience.

I bought and read a few self-published books on Amazon. The lesson I learned was that you should never, under any circumstances whatever, pay for a self-published book. The average quality of writing is atrocious.

Publishers may not do much direct improvement of your writing, but even if they perform a purely censorious function of printing good writing and refusing to print bad writing, they're adding a lot of value.

(And my understanding is that they do in fact work with you to improve your writing, but I have no experience in the field.)