FOOL PLATE SPECIAL: An Investment Opinion
Stephen King Horrifies Booksellers

Stephen King's latest online novel will be sold directly to the consumer next week, sidestepping Simon & Schuster -- and the Amazon.coms of the world that validated the e-book concept for him earlier this year. The Internet is proving to be the great leveler it was billed to be, only it's not only leveling the playing field. It is also leveling traditional industries to the ground.

By Rick Aristotle Munarriz (TMF Edible)
July 20, 2000

Come Monday, Stephen King fans will be able to download the first installment of The Plant from his official website. It's a novel that might very well find both old and new economy literary bellwethers quivering with fear. That King, he sure scribes some scary stuff.

You see, the new online book -- in the same comic gruesome style of his classic Christine -- is not being put out by his traditional publisher, Viacom's (NYSE: VIA) Simon & Schuster. Philtrum Press is handling the details. Philtrum's staff consists of just two people. King is one of the two.

Rule Breaker Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) will also be left out in the cold. While the online retailing giants helped fuel more than a half-million downloads back in March when his Riding the Bullet made its e-book exclusive debut, online distribution is about to get even leaner.

"There's a lot of plumage here, but I wonder if the beast underneath isn't still pretty scrawny," he wrote at the time of the 66-page short story's release. Wasn't Thinner a King novel, too?

Scrawny is apropos in a different sense right now with King cutting out the middle-dotcom-man completely this time. King wrote Misery. The online and offline distribution channels are feeling it.

Self-publishing has become an easy tool for the masses. If you want to ramble on any subject of interest, Themestream.com will provide the platform and pay you based on the traffic you generate. Similar incentives await amateur financial writers in our new Soapbox area. From the ego-stroking for popular thinkers at epinions to the musical spotlight of MP3.com, ego boosts and payback now await for the creative with minimal overhead and red tape.

But King is going one step further by becoming both the media and the medium. His site is already popular with fans who want to know everything from whether he responds personally to all his fan mail (he can't anymore) to whether the rumors that he has a haunted house every Halloween are true (they're not).

The Plant is intriguing for a variety of reasons. For starters, King's accountant thinks it will be a hit. King's own kids don't. The terms of the deal are based on the simplicity of the honor system. Download the first 5000-7000 word installment, send him a buck. Next month, the second episode will follow at the same price. Napster with a conscience and an offering basket? The move harkens back to the days of shareware when folks who used the goods were encouraged to pay for the downloaded software.

There will be a catch this time. As long as at least 75% of those who download the segments mail in the dollar, King will continue beyond the first two installments. "If you pay, the story rolls," he writes. "If you don't, the story folds." Put another way, if you feed The Plant it continues to grow. Neglect it and it dies.

Does that mean Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Viacom's Sumner Redstone will be out to sabotage the system with multiple free downloads? Let's hope not. King doesn't plan on going glueless forever.

"I love my editors, and I like my publisher," he writes on his site. "But if I could break some trail for all the midlist writers, literary writers, and just plain marginalized writers who see a future outside the mainstream, that's great."

Just like Riding the Bullet was back in March, The Plant becomes an interesting trial balloon in the field of self-publishing. How far and how high it will float is the question. Riding the Bullet was a huge success, in part because the online giants were giving it away early on to lure in new customers. The only thing that is for certain is that next time you see King he might just have a billfold full of singles.

What King may not realize -- or maybe he does and his reluctant pioneer rhetoric is a magnetic ploy -- is the significance of stephenking.com going forward. The traffic generated from the publicity next week is bound to be substantial. Will many of those "midlist" and "just plain marginalized" writers make the site a haven for self-distribution? Is stephenking.com about to become an unlikely source for non-ecrypted fiction from a series of upstart authors? Like a King cliffhanger gone Hollywood, we'll just have to see how this one plays itself out in the frozen hedgemaze.

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