When Stephen King pulled the plug on his online novel venture, “The Plant,” a lot of critics of both web commerce and electronic books jumped and down screaming “I told you so — this stuff will never sell.”
King recently released financial information on “The Plant,” however, and based on those figures the experiment was are sounding success. Using an honor system whereby people were supposed to pay for downloading installments of the serial novel, CNET reported that King “netted” $463,832.27. I’m assuming that is a total revenue figure rather than a net profit.
If it’s profit, the result is incredible. Even if it’s just total revenues, however, that’s a resounding success considering that the typical novel made out of old fashioned paper might earn its author $5,000 or so (only a handful of people make the big bucks like King).
Clearly if you or I write a novel and sell it online we’re not going to get anywhere close to that, but it does show that people are willing to go a lot farther than many people thought down the road of buying novels and other intellectual property in electronic form.
The big loser in King’s release of the financial data for “The Plant” are the big publishers. It turns out that people might not need them after all (I suspect that if e-books ever become widely used, author-owned cooperatives will replace traditional publishers.)