As the internet grows increasingly pervasive, it’s influence being felt in most every industry in this day and age, what will happen to the author of old times? The one who writes books in hopes that a publisher picks it up and supplies it to bookstores and other distributors.
After discussing this briefly with my boss and fellow search engine marketer, In my opinion the changes of the internet are good for the talented author, as you can in theory remove the middleman (the publisher) from the equation.
There are different approaches to how a talented author could make money without a publisher:
1.) Writing free content which is backed by ads, in which case the primary revenue source would be advertising.
2.) Writing premium content which you charge users to buy, such as ebooks, site membership, and so forth.
3.) A combination of the above two, “freemium” content.
I don’t know what the future of traditional books is, but the enterprising author can, with a little creativity and ingenuity, conceivably make more money from the internet than they could through conventional book sales.
June 26th, 2008 at 9:59 am
NPR had a story this morning on Chinese Internet literature. The biggest online publisher monetized the writing by charging 2 cents to read each chapter. This was split with the author. With 200 million daily pageviews, this could add up.
As you would expect, a lot of Chinese authors were very good at ending a chapter with a cliff-hanger.
What was interesting was how excited leading online authors were about their books being printed and published the old-fashioned way.