Interesting author centric view of publishing value chain and economics, and a fun example of how software-adjacent companies are helping authors capture more of the margin for controlling distribution (in the Internet sense, not the book sense). https://mwl.io/archives/6210 

It’s pretty inevitable: if you get to the point where you have a loyal readership, you want your readers to buy your books from “you”, not buy your books from Amazon.

But you sure want your books on Amazon, as a marketing strategy to convert more readers.

“You” because you’re an author, not an e-commerce fulfillment center, but that service is abundantly available for cheaper than Amazon’s cut, which Amazon largely charges less for the fulfillment center and more for the channel to the user.

The B2C arms of AppAmaGooBookSoft do many things well, but the thing they do best, the thing that makes them the most impressive businesses in the world, is that they have durable, multi-year, high-frequency channels to billions of users who happily use and return to them.