Stephen King makes second foray onto Internet with serialized book

Stephen King makes second foray onto Internet with serialized book
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

NEW YORK, JULY 23: Horror author Stephen King will begin publishing a serialized novel on the Internet on Monday, following the smash success of his novella Riding the Bullet, the first work by a major author to be published exclusively online.

Some websites were unable to cope with the demand when the 66-page novella went online on commercial sites in March. However, this time, King has created his own website, www.stephenking.com, where readers can access, from July 24, the first chapter of The Plant, a still-unfinished novel he began writing in 1980.

According to press reports, the novel is about a climbing plant which takes over the offices of a publishing company, offering it financial success in exchange for human sacrifices. Electronic readers will be asked to pay a dollar each time they read a chapter, in an "honor system" created by King.

Despite the suspense King so masterfully creates in his works, readers of The Plant will have to be patient and wait almost a month, to August 21, to read the book's second chapter. And they will be able to find out what happens next only if 75 percent of readers actually pay, by cash or cheque, for the first two segments, according to the website.

"Pay and the story rolls. Steal and the story folds. No stealing from the blind newsboy," King warns on the website. The Plant will be the first work by an internationally acclaimed author published on the internet without the involvement of a publisher and King recognizes the move could revolutionize the publishing world.

"My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing's worst nightmare," writes King. "I love my editors, and I like my publisher. I also like books ... 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," he writes. After Riding the Bullet went online in March, and King's publishing company Philtrum Press received 400,000 orders in the first 24 hours, King said: "This is a watershed moment."

"I think we're at a point where maybe there are five or six, maybe a dozen writers, who could literally change the way people regard reading," said King in an interview published in Time magazine's March 27 issue.