The January 2015 report on author earnings is enough to make most authors sit up and pay attention to the Amazon publishing machine. Headlines like 33% of eBook sales from Amazon.com are indie (self-published) authors or 40% of all dollars earned by authors on eBook sales from Amazon.com are earned by Indie authors all highlight the gradual shift away from the pure traditional publishing paradigm and highlight the success that can be achieved by authors not afraid of learning or experimenting with self-publishing.
This is so damn exciting for a community emerging from under the monopolistic blanket held by the big 5 publishers world-wide over the past few decades. Up until 2007 authors did not have a much of a choice but to collect rejection notices from publishers who, for business reasons, did not or could not accept their books for publication. Since 2007 however, Amazon’s KDP platform and its suite of other offerings aimed at Indie authors have had the author-community gripped in a wave of excitement.