A few weeks ago, we published a book called Denglisch for Better Knowers, a (hopefully) humorous book about how the English language could be improved by taking new words and concepts from German. Like "ear worm", which describes the phenomenon of an annoying song getting stuck in your head. Safe to say, it's a fun book, but not a particularly controversial one.

Imagine how surprised we were, then, when our book suddenly found itself an unlikely political tool in a battle between Amazon – corporate omnishop and consumer's wet dream – and our publisher Ullstein's parent media conglomerate, Bonnier. As previous contracts between the two expire, they have locked horns over ebook pricing, commission structure and marketing, echoing a similar dispute currently frothing in the US between Amazon and the publisher Hachette.

Amazon's response to this deadlock has been to delay the shipping of certain books, like ours, as reported in the New York Times. For a time, Amazon even went so far as to remove the buy button on certain Hachette titles. Which is part of the reason you might expect us to be with the publishers, and against Amazon. It's David v Goliath, right? Well, for writers just watching the battle, perhaps not quite.

Publishers have lots of books, need to make a profit, and are battling declining reader attention spans, so they are only able to devote a certain amount of time to helping writers market their books anyway. Sure, they'd like to do more, but then they'd also like to not go bankrupt and lose all their jobs. Books are important to their authors – the culmination of probably a year's quiet, secluded labour – but to a publisher, it's inevitably a part of their portfolio. Whether it'll be born an instant bestseller or end its short life in a bargain bin, the market will decide. If you – the writer – aren't happy with that roll-of-the-dice indifference, you'll have to do some marketing yourself to try and change it.

Meanwhile, Amazon has many millions of books, and needs to make a profit, so it'll only be able to devote a certain, proportional amount of time to helping writers too. That is, none. However, a distribution chain with as few middlemen as possible is less likely to break, so middlemen like bookstores and book publishers will slowly be shoehorned out of the distribution chain. This is the Way of the Internet. We can talk about good and evil, quality and quantity, tradition and progress. But it won't help, and eventually it won't matter.

Amazon has already won the war, because it understands convenience. Given the choice between two decisions requiring equal effort, most people will make the ethical one. But once you factor in that we're all busy, tired, poor, lazy, confused, and consider any day that we don't lose a child in the supermarket to be a mini-triumph, in the end we always come back to convenience. The perfect place to set up any paygate is between people's time and money. Publishers will one day have to adapt to the new stripped-down duties required of them – to go PublishingLite – once they are no longer the unique link between us and thousands of now-defunct bookstores. The environment is changing. The hammer is coming down.

The eventual conclusion to this feels obvious to us: if Amazon squeezes publisher margins, publishers react by lowering authors' commissions on ebooks or reducing advances, and therefore self-publishing will become more attractive to us. If the publishers keep refusing the deal, however, then Amazon – the world's largest book distributor – stops distributing our books. Again our sales and advances decline, and self-publishing becomes more attractive. Either way, Amazon wins again.

So, as far as we – the writers – are concerned, the publishing industry versus Amazon is not quite a simple, clear-cut David v Goliath story, but more like Goliath v Goliath's brother. Let's call him Gorm. David ran away a long time ago. We're one of the villagers, hiding behind a tree while Goliath and Gorm thump each other for exclusive rights to bully us. We're just waiting for the dust to settle, before we go grovelling to whoever wins.

To Amazon, Hachette and Bonnier, it's a battle. To us, it looks like an inevitable reshuffling of the board – a likely foregone conclusion – where one day, instead of getting pocket money from Mum, we might be getting it from Dad. Oh, and Dad's a bit of a bastard.