It gave writers a realistic way to publish their own books – first using "print on demand" technology and, later, ebook platforms like Amazon's Kindle.
Just as important, it gave writers a way to market their books using blogs, social media and so on.
Before the Internet, self publishing had been a high-risk strategy. You needed to invest a lot of money up front to print enough copies of your book to benefit from economies of scale. Then you needed to sell them – not easy when most bookstores wouldn't touch self-published titles.
Now writers could manage their entire careers from a laptop. And they didn't need to invest money up front.
- Their books were either digital (meaning a unit cost of zero). Or they were "printed on demand" (so they didn't have to pay to produce a copy until a customer had bought one).
