To the unenlightened, the word ‘e-publishing’ immediately brings to mind vanity publishing, where (awfully written) rejected manuscripts find their home. With the growing number of independent authors who consciously choose to self-publish online (yours truly included), this perception is hopefully being changed. Take for example Graham Storrs’ amazing ebook TimeSplash, or MCM’s entire publishing venture. Great fiction, and not published by commercial powerhouses.

However, electronic publishing need not be limited to the lesser known authors. Given the global reach of the internet, it seems obvious that an author with an already established fan base would find e-publishing a viable alternative to print. However, to my knowledge as of yet few famous authors have focused their attention on the e-publishing route. But I did a little digging on one famous author who has: Stephen King.

As far as I’m aware, Stephen King was the first prominent best-selling author to attempt exclusively web-based publishing. His debut in the field of electronic publishing was the novella Riding the Bullet published March 2000 in association with Simon & Schuster. Riding the Bullet is a 16,000 word story of Alan Parker, who is hitchhiking to see his dying mother and is picked up by a mysterious stranger. During the drive, Alan discovers a terrible secret about the stranger, and must make a difficult choice, a choice that can mean life or death.

The novella was at first exclusively available online to ebook and PC users, in a downloadable format for a fixed price of $2.50. Funnily enough, Stephen King himself, as a Mac owner, could not download his own book! As a publicity stunt, the ebook was freely downloadable for the first week of its release, with the result that the web servers hosting the novella were overloaded by the sudden surge of traffic and crashed. While a headache for the web servers, the crash was a clear sign of popularity, and over 100,000 internet users bought the ebook. The ebook is still for sale online today.

The novella was a definite sign of success for both Stephen King and his publisher. Riding the Bullet was deemed to be the dawn of a new era, and of the growing importance of ebooks. However, the venture was not entirely problem free: the ebook was originally encrypted to prevent both printing and electronic copying and thus protect the story from copyright violations, but hackers cracked the feature within hours of its release. Unencrypted PDF files made their way onto numerous websites, and are still accessible today. While the monetary losses were likely negligible given that many booksellers had given the novella away for free, it did raise concerns about piracy issues with electronic formats.

It is due to these very concerns that Stephen King’s following attempt at e-publishing was based on an entirely different business model, and he attempted publishing a serial novel on his own website. It is possible that Stephen King assumed it would be a more lucrative pricing model, as it was back in the 19th century when used by Dickens and other authors, although the author claims that financial returns were only a secondary interest to his attempt.

Thus Stephen King began to publish his serial novel The Plant, a story about an editor working at a publishing house. The editor rejects a rather odd manuscript, and, unsettled by the realistic photographs which accompanied the manuscript, gives the police the author’s address. Enraged, the author sends the editor a mysterious plant, and horror ensues.

Stephen King was actually recycling material, as he had actually begun writing The Plant back in the 1980’s, sending what later became the first instalment to his friends in lieu of a Christmas card. He put the first part on his website, available for anyone to download, and asked people to pay $1.00. The payment was entirely based on an honour system, and with the incentive of future updates should a certain target be met. There were supposed to be thirteen instalments total. On his website, Stephen King outlined his payment plan: the first three instalments would cost $1.00, parts four to eight would cost $2, and all subsequent updates would be free of charge, capping the total book cost at $13.00.

Over 150,000 users downloaded the first instalment, and 120,000 paid. For the first three instalments, the target was met. To offset the increased price of subsequent updates, Stephen King doubled the update length from 27 to 54 pages. However, with the fourth instalment, the total number of downloads fell to 40,000, and the number of paying readers dropped to 46%. The drop in numbers may have been partially due to multiple downloads by the same user for different platforms, whether their laptops, e-readers, or phones, but the rising costs most definitely were a factor as well. The fifth instalment followed much the same route, possibly exacerbated by the fact that Stephen King had warned readers of the situation and there was a growing expectation that the book would remain unfinished. Ultimately Stephen King posted the sixth part for ‘free’ to reward users who had paid for the first three parts. He then abandoned the novel to complete other projects, promising to eventually return to the story.

Outsiders blamed the project’s outcome on untrustworthy readers who wouldn’t comply to the honour system, and from the publisher’s perspective, The Plant was considered a failure. After all, 40,000 downloads–whilst a sizeable number–hardly compared to his millions of print readers. Yet the New York Times claimed that The Plant failed not because e-publishing wasn’t viable, but because King did not understand his readership, and that his novels were not made for serialization; a ridiculous claim considering the success of King’s serialized version of The Green Mile, which had dominated the New York Times’ bestseller list for weeks.

Stephen King had an entirely different outlook on the matter. He views the venture as a success, stating that while the revenue generated is not big in the context of the bookselling market, The Plant is not a book. It had no printing cuts, publisher costs, or agent fees. His business model simply needed tweaking.

[EDIT] In July 2008, King experimented with a brand new business model with his short story N, brought to life as a video series that combined story, film, and comic book styles. Of the venture, King said, “I’m always interested in new delivery systems for stories, and always curious about how those systems work with the old story-telling verities. This one, it seems to me, works extraordinarily well.”

In February 2009, Stephen King, working in conjunction with Amazon, released an ebook available exclusively on the Kindle, priced at $2.99. The novella, UR, follows a college professor who, via his pink Kindle, finds a newspaper that tells of a future event he feels compelled to forestall. While Amazon was tight-lipped about its success, there were rumours that the sales of the ebook reached ‘five figures’ within three weeks. Over a year later, the ebook remains in the top 200 paid bestsellers list and they’ve actually upped the price to $3.75.

The publishing industry may be scorning authors who shun tradition and self-publish online today, but I remain hopeful. We’ve just got to keep on tweaking.

Many thanks to Merrilee for linking me to Maureen’s blog!

You’re in a bar. You walk up to the bar, bump into an ex-colleague of yours. He’s there with a guy you don’t recognize: a dark-haired lothario in a sharp blue suit who takes your hand and kisses it, winking slyly.

Or you’re at a job interview. Your prospective boss arrives. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days, her suit is wrinkled, her hand is clammy and limp. On the top of her blouse is a stain of what looks like ketchup.

These moments last minutes — sometimes mere seconds — but in that short span of time you pass a judgement on their appearance, their body language, their mannerisms. First impressions. Love them or hate them, you can’t help make them.

There are thousands of books and articles dedicated to this very subject, counselling the hapless on how to make a good first impression (whatever good may be!). But how does this translate to writing?

I am currently re-reading How Not To Write A Novel by Howard Mittelmark & Sandra Newman, a tongue-in-cheek guide that not only makes me laugh, but offers occasional insight, too:

The reader knows everyone poos. But if the first thing a character does is poo in front of the reader, the reader will think of him as the Pooing Character forevermore. (Chapter 5, pg. 69)

In real life, you have a chance to reverse or undo first impressions. Not so in books. Fiction has got to be better than reality, remember? The reader’s first impressions of a character are very difficult to change, meaning that the introductory scene is extremely important as it’ll set the tone for the reader’s perception of that character.

Considering the main character is the most important character in your book, it follows that he or she must make a good first impression — good meaning not courteous and polite but good for your intentions, for the way you want to portray him or her.

In the first scene of my WIP novel, my main character is ambushed by an odd stranger on a dark road, who gives her cryptic warnings until she punches his nose and runs away. I hope to convey the fighting spirit that will see her through all the troubles ahead.

What is your main character doing when people first meet him or her?

Being a writer is like being a photographer. We can provide a snapshot of a life, a moment, one perspective — but however long or short that moment lasts, there will always be other stories left untold, whispering at the edges, like the blurred out faces of tourists in the background of your holiday snaps. You look at the photograph and you wonder what happened next to the people inside, what roads they took after the story stopped. Where are they now?

I recently finished reading The Postmistress by Sarah Blake, easily one of the best books I’ve read in quite a while. Near the end, one of the characters recounts the tale of Theseus, the Greek hero who sails off to war, promising his father that should he return alive, his boat will have white sails.

For years, the father climbs up to the mountain cliff and scans the horizon, desperate for a hint of movement, the return of his son. Every day he walks up there, and sees nothing but the taunting white froth of the sea. And then, one day, sails on the horizon. Sails, after so long. But the sails are black and the father jumps off the cliffs to his death while Theseus is returning home victorious, his promise forgotten.

It would have been so easy to fix that mistake and create a happily ever after. But without the mistake, the story wouldn’t have mattered, wouldn’t have endured. The mistake makes the story, is the story. It is why in the photograph, the author focused in on Theseus as opposed to anyone else in the frame.

Out of the countless stories out there, it is the ones with the most mistakes in them that stick with me longer, both as a reader and a writer. That is how I pick which photographs to take, which photographs to share. But then I can’t help but look at all the untold mistakes blurred in the background, and want to bring them into focus too, hear their voices, find a way out of the mess.

I always pictured writing as a way of making sense of things, a way of setting things right. You push your characters through every imaginable hell but somehow, somehow, things make sense at the end, the mistakes unravel into orderly lines. And they lived happily ever after. But now I’m wondering whether I’m not fixing or tidying, I am simply following a mistake for as far as it lets me.

You may have heard of all the drama I went through with my last flat, starting with literal puddles on the floor from condensation (my fault, apparently, for breathing) and ending with the water pipe above my bed bursting and causing the mess you can see here (and it looked even worse by the end!). Fun times, eh?

After traipsing across half of London (my brother did most of that) we managed to find a shiny new flat sans condensation and burst pipes. Victory! I’d show you pictures of my new, non-destroyed room, but it is still an embarrassing mess of half-open boxes and naked walls.

I keep looking around and wondering when I accumulated so much stuff, and how to go about getting rid of all the things I never use: clothes that don’t fit, useless but pretty gadgets, old Christmas and birthday cards, not to mention a plethora of posters that have sat in an envelope for several years now. I’m a pack rat; I like collecting things. But it seems to me that a new place deserves a tabula rasa (or as much as I can make one, anyway). How to go about getting rid of the unnecessary?

Since I am entirely one-track-minded, this whole debacle got me thinking about writing, and more specifically, editing.

I write the way I acquire new things: impulsively, with a half-idea of where I want to go and a lot of willingness to splash out on an unexpected find. The end result is a thrown-together look that may work with my wardrobe, but is a little lacking when it comes to my writing. But how to streamline it all?

Ah, editing. Of course. But then the problem becomes figuring out what to get rid of, and what to keep. And when I get to that point, I do exactly what I have just done: I pack up and move house.

I open a new word document, I change the font from Times New Roman to Garamond, and, bit by bit, I move sentences over, sometimes one word at a time, sometimes in great lumps. From the first document to the second, all those spare words that I cannot be bothered to retype get dropped, and all those awkwardly shaped sentences get ironed out.

Yes, some of the bad stuff creeps through — I am a packrat, after all. But eventually, if my story moves houses enough times, I can be sure a good amount of the crap is lost.

How do you edit?