I love Stephen King, but a thread I recently started in Cafe Society got me to thinking about one thing he did that really bugged me.
About 6-7 years ago SK was trying out the online book thing, and was releasing the Plant one chapter at a time. The idea was that readers could download it for $1 a chapter (honor system) and if the payment rate was above something like seventy percent he would continue. I guess after the halfway point he decided the payment rate was too low and he stopped the project.
Actually, although I liked the idea of the online project, it really bugged me that he was charging so much. $1 times the expected 14 chapters is $14 for a book without cover or proper binding, for which you had to wait weeks, and if I remember correctly, wasn’t well-edited either. His idea was to cut out the middleman (a noble idea), but instead of passing on some of the savings to the consumer, he was keeping them all for himself. I lost a degree of respect for him then.
I wouldn’t mind hearing from other Dopers if they had a different take on this. I really think SK is a great writer and would love it if someone could point out any errors in my logic.
Yes, but presumably he didn’t do it on the internet. His customers at least received a hard copy. Also, it would be interesting to know how much he charged for a chapter, compared to the price of a whole book.
In the nineteenth century, it was common for novels to be released (initially at least) in serial form, but this was generally done through magazines and journals, rather than simlpy by printing discrete chapters. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous abolitionist work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly was serialized before being issued as a complete book.
Forgot to add that Dickens’ chapters were, like Stowe’s, usually serialized in a magazine or journal, which generally contained other material such as short stories, non-fiction pieces, etc. And part of the reason that this was done was to make them more affordable for more people.
It’s worth remembering that proper books were, in the nineteenth century, considerably more expensive than they are today, in terms of their price as a percentage of people’s earnings. With the relatively cheap price of paperbacks today, serializing doesn’t make too much sense from an economic point of view; this was not the case in the nineteenth century.
It probably does make sense if it’s done online but, as the OP points out, all you get is an electronic copy, and many people believed that King’s novel should have been cheaper than it was because of this.
How was this suppose to work? Did his server count the # of downloads and he counted the # of dollar bills sent to him?
Sounds like his payment system is the flaw, the honor system works but only if you make it easy enough (there is a self serve farm stand by me where you take your products, add up how much you owe and put the money in a little box, which usually has other money, some from other customers, but normally there is at least enough to make change. Havening someone mail you a dollar, or even paypal per chapter for 14 chapters seems like a big PITA.
Also as you pointed out the price for such a e-book does seem very high $14, with no middleman, and no hard copy.
$14 may be high, but you’ve also got to look at the expected max number of copies sold. A well selling book, I believe, will generally sell about a million copies in the US. As of the time King was releasing the book, there were probably only a million people online regularly. So where as for a paper copy of his book, he might make 20% (?) of a million copies at say $10 a book.
1,000,000 * $10 * 0.20 = $500,000 -> King
So assuming that internet users are twice as likely to buy a Steven King novel as the average populace–a non-print, have-to-read-off-your-computer-screen version even–that still means only 1 in 150 internet users (roughly) is going to buy a copy.
1,000,000 * (1 / 150) * $14 = $93,333 -> King
It might take him less long to write a book without an editor, but the man’s time is money. So unless he could write five times as many books in the same amount of time if he did internet only, it’s really not worth it to him.
This wasn’t the first time SK released a book chapter by chapter. He did the same for The Green Mile though this was not released via the net. I can’t recall whether it was released as articles in an existing magazine or as small paperbacks.
If it was as paperbacks then your comments about the pricing model would still apply as I doubt the cost of six or seven “chapter” paperbacks would have been equal to the final book.
The Green Mile was originally released as small paperbacks, but I don’t remember the price. I’m pretty sure you ended up paying way more than a whole book, though.
A friend of mine downloaded the Plane, and was disgusted enough with it to give me a printout. It was dismal. If you’re gonna release a book at a buck a chapter, there ought to be at least something happening in said chapter, not just a lot of run-on sentences and pointless babble. It failed because it deserved to.
I don’t know anything about the online release of The Plant (I stopped reading King after The Worst Supernatural Thriller Novel Ever Written, aka Insomnia, but back in my King-obsessed days, I was aware that the plant was essentially a Christmas card to King’s close family and friends. Each year, their holiday present was another installment of The Plant, except for one year, when they got advance copies of Eyes of the Dragon instead.
I don’t exactly know how King worked an open-ended, serialized novel, but if he was just looking for a quick buck, I assume that he simply took his old Christmas card, The Plant, and digitized it. So it may not have involved any work on his part that he either hadn’t already done, or was going to do anyway.
It was a slap in the face to Constant Readers who paid for an unfinished story. They should have been able to get their money back.
It made me appreciate Joe Lansdale even more. He puts short stories on his website all the time, free. Damn good stories too. And he probably doesn’t make a jazllionth of the money King makes.
