Mr. King said he made more than $500,000 from sales of the first five chapters of the ”The Plant.” He spent about $124,000 to advertise, and most of the rest is profit. ”The publisher didn’t share in it or anything,” he said.

When I said above that the experiment was disastrous I meant that it was disastrous for the nascent ebook market, and for the people who were left with a truncated book after conscientiously paying for each installment.

So if you like the work, and you take the time to pay a small amount, then everybody wins. You get the content for a very low price. And the publisher can publish without DRM (without DRM is good for everybody) — and makes a bit of money, to keep his work going.

There are two keys to this system’s survival and success. First, you need to have great content. When I download any “donation ware” software, and it really works beautifully to solve my problem — then I shoot off a donation right away. I want to pay to thank the creator and to encourage the product development. I love these products and services and I want them to keep on going: Wikipedia, Open Office, Project Gutenberg, Smultron, Zip Creator, TechGuy.org, … and so many more.

The second key to survival: the publishers should let the users choose how much they want to donate.

It’s not easy to decide if Stephen King’s experiment with donation-ware ebooks was an utter failure, or a smashing triumph. King made some mistakes: he set his bar high (he wanted 75% of the downloaders to pay); he raised his prices from one dollar to two dollars; and he recycled a 100-year-old Nathaniel Hawthorne tale about a killer philodendron. Yes, “the King” quit in the middle of it, because — he said — he wasn’t making as much money this way, compared with his usual methods, where readers pay first and read later.

Keep in mind that, before quitting “The Plant”, King took in — as I remember it — more than $ 400,000. … (If that number is incorrect, someone please correct me. I think that is the amount he profited, after spending around $ 200,000 to set up and manage the website and the system for downloading. It’s strange that the long WikiPedia article on this subject does not mention the amount of money that King took in.)

That $ 400,000 was not enough for Stephen, but I imagine that most publishers would be mildly satisfied.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

This seems to be the classic shareware model for raising funds. Rob Preece mentions that he has experimented with this model. TeleRead ran a story about the author Richard Herley who offered his work “The Penal Colony” and other novels as shareware.

Back in 1999 SF author John Scalzi put his first novel “Agent to the Stars” online as shareware. He accepted donations through 2004. Scalzi says “I made about $4,000 that way, which was not shabby considering I was not a known quantity in science fiction at the time”. Scalzi also obtained over $600 for the short story “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story” via the shareware model.

The ebook shareware experiment with the highest profile was probably the disastrous serialization of “The Plant” by Stephen King in 2000. King decided that too few of the people who downloaded his work were paying for it, so he stopped writing the novel in the middle and terminated the project.

The problem with this system is that it is an extra effort to pay for the content. It’s kinda like the reverse of Amazon’s 1-click system. Your desire to get the product has already been satiated… no need to pay.

Which is why I wouldn’t pay. Not because the product is bad or that I don’t wish to support their endeavours … but because the impulse of desire has already faded after download. I won’t pay … because I don’t need to.

Does that make sense?

Your answer will pretty much give you an idea of what kind of ‘advantage’ there is to the ‘honesty box’ model.

I suggested that this model hasn’t worked for me and I suspect it won’t work for them, either. But good luck.

Rob Preece

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com