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As long as the writers are making enough money to produce their best output, the ideal situation is as long a tail as possible. The greater the variety of author, the greater the variety of books.

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But that's the core issue. A long tail is good for Amazon and theoretically good for readers. It's not really helpful for writers. Any in the long tail are unlikely to ever pay back an advance and actually make money off sales let alone be making enough to produce their best output.

So total unit sales being up doesn't necessarily counter that statement "no one reads books anymore". Unit sales being "up" has a lot of qualifiers.

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