If you can quickly crate high quality books that people actually like you will make a lot of money as an author.  To paraphrase one of the best "We don't subsidize an incompetent hore why must we subsidize incompetent authors."<p>Most published authors suck which has a lot to do with them making no money.  What publishers focus on is not high quality books but rather figuring out how to convince people to buy crap books that they will not actually read.<p>Amazon cut's into this in two ways, if you can read reviews before you buy you are less likely to pickup something you don't like.  The other approach is by removing the limited shelf space at the book store you reduce the control large publishing houses have over the channel which allows higher quality books to compete without backing from a major publishing houses .