Is it only me, or does anyone else think that the prevailing business practices of the likes of Amazon are an absolute rip-off when it comes to the low royalties? You go through all the work of writing, editing and producing a book and upload it. Amazon does nothing by the way of marketing & promition, so you end up marketing links to your book on social media yourself. If you want a decent price, you get 35% royalties, maybe another 5% for affiliate marketing. That means that Amazon gets more out of the project than you do, despite the fact that you're the one doing almost all the work (handling downloads & payments seems like a pretty commoditized thing these days).

Compare that to selling music on bandcamp: They take 15%, the rest is yours to keep.

It is absolutely beyond me, how self-publishing authors put up with that.

I GUESS the difference between music and e-Books, to some extent, is how the channel influences perceptions of the quality of the product. People have got very used to low quality writing being available for free on the web. So if your ebook is just another piece of text on some website, many people will not be willing to pay for it, whereas being on amazon creates an expectation that the quality would be in line with properly published work (where, at least, there is a four-eyes principle at work, at shouldering financial risks around a book project etc.)

Someone should do something about that and create an ebook marketplace that enforces certain quality standards and pays decent royalties.