Independent authors: what’s your Plan B if Amazon fails?

Once upon a time, it hardly mattered to authors and publishers if one book printer or book distributor or bookstore failed. There were so many others that nobody would miss it all that much.

But now we have independent authors and small publishers that rely solely on Amazon’s ecosystem (through CreateSpace and KDP) to publish, print, and distribute their books. Need a book cover for your printed book? You can use Amazon’s Cover Creator to design one. Need a cover for your ebook? You’re in luck; Amazon has a Cover Creator tool for your Kindle ebook, too. The only hitch is that, once you’ve used Cover Creator to create the cover, Amazon owns that cover. You can’t take it with you — if, for example, you wanted to bring your book to iUniverse, Lulu, or IngramSpark, or even to a traditional offset printing company.