The major problem with modern society is summed up in password use.

Apparently, there are no women who work for Bards and Sages. This is, of course, somewhat news to me.

Chainmail bikinis I get. Frogs with boobs? Not so much.

Phoebe Wray is a director, actress, and playwright and has starred in the Off-Off-Broadway Movement in New York City. She was the voice of the Tree Dragon and the Twell Tribe on the PlayStation 2 game Darkling Skye. Her work currently appears in the military sci-fi anthology No Man’s Land. Phoebe was kind enough to chat for a bit in regards to her work and the specialized genre she writes in.

But is that resentment truly an issue, or just a small, vocal minority of customers? We went to the Amazon.com customer forum to find out. Amazon.com has become, in many ways, the primary battleground for this discussion. With both its Createspace POD service and the Kindle self-publishing service, Amazon has made it easier than ever for authors to self-publish and promote their own books.

Though readers don’t seem to care one way or another how a book is produced, they do have strong feelings on authors themselves. In this age of social media, readers enjoy interacting with authors. Almost 65% of readers responded that they enjoy being able to interact with authors on social networking sites. And 73% said that having a positive experience with an author online increased the likelihood of the reader buying that author’s book. This is a boon for independent authors, who because of limited resources depend on social networking sites to promote.

In Part Three of the series, we examine how readers view indie books and what they really care about.

In this article, we look at the actual results from the first of our informal surveys and identify important ethical considerations for authors.

Even if you have maintained a healthy level of confidence without creeping into an unhealthy sense of entitlement, it is easy to get caught up in the “us versus them” mentality that permeates through many independent publishing communities. It is a mentality fed by almost every single subsidy press and POD service, because it specifically discourages authors from following the traditional publishing route for all of the wrong reasons.

As we continue our discussion about the temptations that lead authors to unethical behavior, we take a look at the sense of entitlement and how it clouds our vision.