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By Paul Biba

Thanks to boingboing for the heads up about this article on io9. Here’s a snippet:

… Stackpole is convinced that both established and fledgling authors need to embrace new content delivery methods or fade into irrelevance. In fact, he offered evidence that digital publishing will not only be necessary for authors, but that it will work in their favor.

From Stackpole’s perspective as an established author (more than three dozen published novels, eight of them Star Wars novels), digital publishing offers more control and direct, reliable payments. Selling stories directly though his website generates a payment before the buyer has even finished downloading the story, and the profit margin on even a short story is far higher than on a paper novel. By comparison, the lag time on payments for sales of a hard copy novel is six to nine months, and even then he pretty much has to take the publisher’s word for it that the accounting is accurate.

de1bc66660b5d7a0.jpegA lot of writers are worried about online piracy, but Stackpole dismissed those concerns. “People downloading my stories from the big torrent sites were never going to buy them anyway. It’s no money out of my pocket.” He even admitted to downloading some of his own books from bittorrent sites if he didn’t already have a digital copy, saying it was far easier than scanning it in himself. …

Off Topic: I wonder how much of the net is composed of material which is linking to, referring to, or copying from other sites on the net. I bet it is a significant amount. Paul

 
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