Two Leading Authors

Join the eBook Bandwagon

Ready for Prime Time     Textbooks     Teen Market     Retirees

Best-selling authors, such as Stephen King and James Ellroy, are no longer fighting the trend, but are now selling digital rights to their works.  Ellroy has taken the traditional path via a book auction among five publishers for anthology rights to five magazine articles. 

King has gone a different route – selling electronic versions of his new works directly to the public via the Internet.  In the spring, King offered his first eBook, Riding the Bullet.  The response: some 500,000 copies made todate.  In fact, downloads, in the first few days, jammed up the Internet.  However, many were free copies.  And, according to a bookreporter.com survey, only one in five downloaders actually read it—the Internet equivalent of the unread book sitting on the shelf.

(The Plant is King’s latest digital book.  It’s available in separate downloadable installments, directly from his website http://www.stephenking.com/download.html.  However, King is only guaranteeing the first three installments of The Plant, just in case this online experiment is not a success.)

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