From a Carter Phipps post at Priceonomics which asserts that in a world of disappearing paper, authors will have to make their living from opportunities other than book sales:

“What the book industry lacks in economic might, however, it makes up in intellectual mindshare. When it comes to culture, the book industry punches way above its weight. Just think how many major movies, culture-changing ideas, global trends, historically significant movements, and unforgettable characters were born in the pages of a book. Five hundred years after Gutenberg’s breakthrough changed the world, books are still, we might say, the intellectual unit of culture. They remain a critical medium through which ideas and memes propagate across our cultural landscape, and we all have a stake in how well that medium is functioning. 

Without question, the digital revolution has already changed the face of the book industry. Amazon’s rise, Border’s bankruptcy, the decline of the independent bookstore, the rise of ebooks–creative destruction is a force many in publishing are intimately familiar with.  

‘Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea,’ wrote popular humorist and writer Garrison Keillor in the New York Times. ‘If you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.’

Authors may not be quite as bad off as Keillor humorously projected. It says something about how fast the industry is changing that in the three years since those words were written, BookSurge has become Amazon’s CreateSpace and PubIt was effectively shut down. But just how are authors adapting and surviving amidst the technological changes that are revolutionizing the media landscape? Are they making money in today’s publishing industry?”