dma1965

Jason Dunn

He's an exception to the rule - he's one of the GOOD lawyers. :-)

Jeff Kirvin

He pulled the project because his math was flawed. He wanted 75% "pay-through" on downloads. Sounds reasonable, until you realize that publishing ebooks on the net is not like a physical print run. You can't possibly know how many copies are actually in circulation. You can know how many people downloaded from your site, but not how many copies they emailed to friends, or how many copies were downloaded from Usenet. You can know how many copies have been paid for, but using that number in any kind of percentage calculation is meaningless. I know his numbers were off because I paid for every installment, but I only downloaded one of them from his website. The rest I acquired "elsewhere."

What King should have done is set a dollar threshold for each installment. "Send me $50,000 or you won't see the next chapter. Mwahahahahahaha." At least that's a concrete number that you either meet or you don't. Percentages don't mean anything in digital.

He also was under a lot of pressure from his publisher to finish "Dreamcatcher" as I recall, and said that he might come back and finish "The Plant" when he gets time.

Jason Dunn

Indeed, he did. No one but he knows why he didn't do it, but there is some speculation. The first is that he wasn't making enougn money off of it - only something like 10,000 people paid for the first issue ($1 each), and the numbers went down with each issue. For someone like King, who's used to making millions per book, this is chump change. If you could spend a week making $10,000 or making $1 million, what would you do?

There's not a big enough eBook market out there yet, but the market won't grow unless there is quality, top-tier brands out there for people to buy. Classic chicken and the egg - and the publishers are laughing right now.

Eventually, it will actually work. :-)