Comment Re:Thanks for the list of artists to boycott (Score 2) 123
And the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely high.
I'm by no means defending the status quo, but having produced music and books which have been freely available for years, I've learned one thing. Marketing is a major hurdle that any independent content producer will have to learn to do effectively in order to make money. The barriers to entry have been lowered, and that has introduced a flood of competition, so that it's extremely difficult to find an audience even at a price of "free" without resorting to tactics that I personally find objectionable (spamming your products all over every available form with a "submit" button that you can find seems to be the best way to be successful as far as I can tell, apart from having already high-profile friends to do word-of-mouth/reviews for you -- that and writing books that explain "how to get rich quick by selling books on the internet."
So while I agree with you that you certainly can make money online, just the fact that the barriers have been lowered isn't sufficient. Be prepared to throw in a lot of time trying to figure out ways to attract even a bit of attention for your work - if you aren't a good marketer, then it's down to luck, and relying on luck is a good way to stay broke.:) The positive thing is, it seems like if you aren't an A-list novelist anyway, this would be the expected course of action even through a traditional publishing route, since I hear that they only bother actually promoting the ones that have an already-quantifiable ROI. I don't think you (or I) are losing anything at all by pursuing the self-publishing route.:)