A market I have found very interesting is pen & paper role playing games. There has been an explosion of self-published content in the past three to five years.

A market I have found very interesting is pen & paper role playing games. There has been an explosion of self-published content in the past three to five years. A good portion of it quite high quality, often coming from authors who previously had written titles for "big" publishers (Even in its glory days TSR was hardly a titan.) The channels users are both finding out about these self published RPGs and purchasing them is not Amazon. Instead it starts with blogs, forums, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo, and is sold directly on the author's website, through Lulu, and Drivethrustuff (RPGNow etc.) I was pleasantly surprised to see Wizards offering old Dungeons and Dragons books on RPGNow. Other "big" publishers have been doing the same. As an unknown underdog, you want scale and recognition over paltry margins. Amazon does this for unknown authors by providing mass market distribution. The author still needs to get some initial traction, but the author never loses sales because the consumer couldn't find the book, or didn't have time to travel to the store while he or she was ready to turn over money in exchange for an unknown book. Bookstores and publishers are the losers here. They are middlemen who do distribution and scaling using methods from the pre-Internet era. As more content becomes digital only it is hard to see retail stores faring well. That may be an understatement, considering that this trend has been well underway for a decade. For now I'm positive on the prospects for retail clothing stores.