From an interview on Salon with Cory Doctorow:
But I don’t think that’s true of the majority of artists. I think the majority of artists get the least that the investor class can get away with. They are, from the perspective of the investor class, largely interchangeable. That is to say, if you plan to publish 15 fantasy novels this month that are going to be primarily aimed at people who are buying them in airports to read on an airplane, then really what matters is that you just have 15 novels that are of readable quality. And there’s far more than 15 people willing to write you a novel this month for it.
What happens when the number of “channels” increases?
There’s more people competing to buy your stuff. And when there’s more people competing to buy your stuff, then they can be played against one another. You can shop around for a better deal. I think what’s happened, not just in the arts but everywhere around the world, is that we’ve had incredible waves of concentration in industry, where we have policies that favor extremely large entities at the expense of smaller and medium-size ones. (Italics mine.)
This is what I’ve been saying (and in the splintered author). The problems authors are facing are neither caused by Amazon’s dominance nor are they caused by traditional publishing. Presenting a dispute between the two as a battle for publishing’s soul is missing the fact that we already lost publishing’s soul years ago. It didn’t happen when Amazon launched KDP, if anything, that was a lifeboat for authors (more channels are always better). It happened when all power in the industry concentrated in the hands of a few large multinationals.
We don’t solve this problem by picking one multinational to win over the others and then hope they won’t step on us. We solve it by introducing new channels—new ways of connecting authors to readers—and the only way to do that sustainably is to build communities or become a part of one. To do that in a way that properly leverages the resources you have, you need to understand the strategic role of software.
If you expect whichever multinational that wins the current dispute to be a fluffy teddy bear who will be nice to you forevermore, you’re going to be disappointed. They already view most of you as interchangeable. Only the authors of bestsellers and blockbusters have any real leverage.
And if you’re a publisher who expects to win out in this market by doing exactly the same thing as a multinational who has—literally—several orders of magnitude more financial resources than you do, then you will be stepped on.
If you’re serious about ‘saving’ publishing, you need to stop playing their game.