Please get a grip, this isn't web 2.0 bullshit, for the authors affected here it's their lives. No one worth a damn self-publishes for very simple reasons, self-publishing doesn't pay out over a years salary in a single check to enable you to work on your next title. Self-publishing doesn't pay for your advertising and publicity or even getting your books into a single bookstore anywhere on the face of the planet.<p>For most authors their job is to write, that's what they're good at and hence is why they do it. They're not marketers, advertisers, or anything. They're writers by definition and occupation.<p>Macmillan is trying to increase the prices it can sell its ebooks for to what they're considering realistic prices. Whether this is true or not isn't the matter of debate here.<p>The question here is the unethical behavior of preventing the distribution of titles from ~25 publishing houses, all subdivisions of the Macmillan Publishers group, despite already agreeing to said groups terms. Amazon has already quite clearly stated they're accepting raised prices. Obviously this bargaining ploy was never going to hurt Macmillan in the first place, but it's seriously hurting many genre writers who rely on the online booksellers like Amazon to provide the selection mortar-based stores cannot.<p>Macmillan has bestsellers for sale, which are predominantly bought off the shelves in mortar-stores. Either in real bookstores or through Walmart, and even drug stores. However, it's the genre writers who have relied on Amazon to distribute their books to their fans, search their websites and, until now, their titles would most likely have been exclusively amazon-linked. Amazon, well aware it sells the predominant amount of Genre books on the market, was willing to pull Macmillan books, including its imprints like Tor/Forge, Minotaur, Griffin, etc. who cater exclusively to genre.<p>You come off as simply ignorant of the publishing world if you truly believe 'self-publishing' is an alternative to mainstream writers. It never will be an alternative. Novels published exclusively as E-books in the near future will still go through an update of the original process where advances are paid, or it'll never catch on as anything more than a tertiary market like audio books.