Apologies if this has been posted already, but I thought this was an interesting article from the guardian blog:

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/06/why_writers_cant_go_it_alone.html

Very interesting.

I'm all for it

Sarah

Well, to a degree they can. Occasionally you get a self published book (A Year in the Merde by Stephen Clarke) that gathers momentum by word of mouth until it's taken up by a main stream publisher, or this, which I mentioned on another thread as being originally published as an online ebook, eventually getting a six figure deal.

Colin M