I am tempted to sign on with an e-book publisher as they have major bookstores signed on to carry their books. What are the drawbacks?
A limited market is the drawback and that means your book will be published, posted on a few Websites and made available on a few bookstore databases and you’ll be lucky if you sell a book. This is not distribution. It is not marketing. It is not advertising and publicity. What it is? A bad deal for the author. You will lose your opportunity of having a traditional publisher publish your book worldwide in all the markets and in all the critical distributor databases. Bookstores do not buy from other bookstores and they certainly will not buy from vanity press Websites, no matter how prestigious they appear to be. The vanity press is exploding with the e-book market and it will be the ruin of many self-published authors. Only the superstar authors will benefit from e-book sales, but they will still keep their traditional print publishers. Paperback books will still sell in the millions and be in demand forever in the future. Paper is not going away.
