4.  Ebooks are a better deal for writers. [Ebooks are a better deal for writers] The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback’s original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word.  Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word.  The sums involved are so minuscule, they’re not even insulting:  they’re quaint and historical, like the whiskey 5 cents sign over the bar at a pioneer village.  Some writers do make it big, but they’re rounding errors as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade.  Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners).  The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity.  Ebooks get you that.  Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions.  They can be googled.

Even better:  they level the playing field between writers and trolls.  When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work —­ for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to not sell a book.  Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves.  Here’s a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by “A reader from Redwood City, CA”: 

[Quoted text]

> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are > smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved.  But > regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever > this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn’t > waste your money.  Download it for free from Corey’s > (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in > disgust —­ this book is for people who think Dan > Brown’s Da Vinci Code is great writing.

Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off.  Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name!  My stars and mittens!  But take a closer look at that damning passage: 

[Pull-quote]

> Download it for free from Corey’s site, read the first > page

You see that?  Hell, this guy is working for me! [Additional pull quotes] Someone accuses a writer I’m thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, “a surprisingly bad writer,” no less, whose writing is “stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!” I wanna check that writer out.  And I can.  In one click.  And then I can make up my own mind.