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A kindle direct title can easily earn you $3 profit even if you keep the price very low, and more like $7 if you price it like a normal book. So if you're able to move that many copies, then certainly yes.

Self-publishing is more profitable per copy. With a publisher you'll make ~10% of cover sales (so $1-1.50 per copy) versus the above.

Publishers offer [small] advances and cover some of the costs like editing. If you can pay the $1250-3500 for a cover design and editor, and can do the marketing, then you don't need a publisher for anything else.

The resources you're going to want are:

  * KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing for main distribution)
  * CreateSpace (turn PDFs into physical print-on-demand and list them on Amazon)
  * Scrivener or softcover.io (writing apps that easily export to ebook formats)
  * Wordpress + Themeforest (or softcover) for a book page

And that's about it. Very doable without a publisher.

I that case, why do established authors do deals with publishers?

When they weren't established authors, they signed deals for the next X books to be with said publisher. Another is that an established author may sell X copies at 15.00/copy, or Y copies at 25.00/copy (but only take 7.00 of the 25). If I'm an author, and my passion is writing, not marketing, if X15 < y7, or even anywhere close to equal, then it makes sense to go with the publisher, so you can spend more time writing

Exactly. I work in publishing and I often wondered why established authors don't just self publish. The answer: not all authors are Tim Ferris. They love having a staff cater to them, market their books, and editorial help. They are not really entrepreneurs like Ferris. They don't want to do too much more than write or whatever else they do (many authors are celebrities in other fields and are busy doing that, like most chefs on the food network).

Because for an established author, an advance can be really big, and also because not every author actually wants to deal with the work described above.

I know I sure as hell didn't, but in my case and my market at the time there just wasn't any other choice.

> Joe Smith is a working fiction writer.

It's worth keeping in mind that non-fiction and fiction are very different ballgames. (And, I believe, erotica is fairly different from fiction too.)

With technical books, the potential audience size is much smaller, but it's way easier to reach a larger fraction of them. When you do, they are more willing to pay a decent price for a copy. The average quality is also, I believe, much higher.

Fiction has a huge glut of authors. It's more difficult for readers to find an author whose quality and writing they like. If you need to learn SQL, it's easy to search for "SQL". It's a lot harder to search for a certain prose style or "voice". Also, frankly, there's a lot of really bad self-published fiction to wade through.

Because of this, I think self-publishing is a better fit for non-fiction than fiction right now.

Erotica is VERY different. It may look saturated, but well written short stories with attractive covers and good blurbs can still sell incredibly well.

And, with the advent of Kindle Unlimited (if Amazon's payments hold at the current level per borrow) sales plus borrows is proving to be even more lucrative than sales alone.

You have just described the poster boy for self publishing.

As long as he prices his books over $2.99, Amazon will give him 70% of the price, so if he sells 30,000 books at $4.99 (approximately what novel length fiction sells for if it's not from a major publisher) he would make about 100k.

Let me just say, I think there are very few authors who can expect sales anywhere near those numbers. NYTimes bestsellers do a fraction of that.

Still, a busy author can easily write 2 to 3 books a year, more if the are organized, determined, and disciplined. Some authors that I know of are putting out a novel a month.

So, he can make a living. And he is MUCH better off without an old fashioned publisher.

As far as services needed, there is a burgeoning industry of freelance editors, cover designers, book designers, etc., that will provide everything a traditional publisher used to provide. OK, yes, except for a marketing budget, but talk to mid-list authors and see what publishers provided to them for marketing. HINT: nada.

How do I know? Without giving away all my secrets, I'm making way more money than I ever thought possible publishing fiction on Amazon KDP. I'm about to jump into non-fiction, which I'm guessing could be even bigger...

You have just described the poster boy for self publishing.

That's not a coincidence. This is a contrived example after all. What I'm trying to get at is that assuming the perfect scenario, is the ecosystem of services there to cater to these guys. Is it feasible that such an author would be able to handle online marketing (getting them into online stores, not getting interviews on morning radio) of physical and ebooks. Would he be able to handle the production of actual printed books?

Also, on the "art" side. Are editor-for-hire types doing the same thing as editors working for publishing houses? Is the relationship the same?I love books. I had a lot of hopes for ebooks in terms of what they'll do for authors. Apart from a pleasant enough reader experience, I haven't felt any earth shattering changes from ebooks.

The ecosystem is there, and getting better all the time.

Reasonable recommendations for ancillary publishing services can be found on any of the popular writer's forums like absolute write or the author's cafe on kboards. Several relevant subreddits also exist.

Like everything, there are scammers and people looking to make a quick buck for shoddy work, but there are also a LOT of frustrated former English and Art majors who have hung out a shingle.

As far as editing goes, you can pay for pretty much anything the publishing houses provided, from a proofreading to copyediting, even a developmental edit (recommendations on story structure, what works, what doesn't work, etc.).

In my experience, book design and editing are easily handled by most authors with even an iota of motivation. It's the marketing that baffles most people. Congratulations, you wrote a book, now what? etc.