Michael A. Stackpole Issues E-Book Challenge To Readers
I'm only just finding out about this, but it seems like something worth noting, even if it's a bit late.
Many will recognize Michael Stackpole's name, he's written pretty broadly and eclectically, stretching from Battletech, through the Star Wars universe and into several flavors of epic fantasy.
Some of his writings have been available as e-versions from various controlled stores such as Amazon and Sony's ebookstore, however he's recently dipped his toe into the waters of self-published e-books, with a bit of a twist.
The toe-dipping part is that he's offering his backlist novels
Once A Hero, and
Talion: Revenant as unrestricted e-books from his
website store (which takes PayPal) for $5. You read that correctly, five American Dollars.
In the case of
Talion, Mr. Stackpole has issued a challenge to his readers: if he can sell 10,000 e-copies of
Talion: Revenant (the same number that the paper version sold) he will write and publish its sequel,
Talion: Nemesis.
Apparently he's had notes for the sequel for quite some time, and even part of it written, and is using the e-sales as sort of a replacement for the Advance for writing the sequel which a publisher would offer if he were following the "traditional" route.
I'm particularly intrigued and impressed by some of the comments he's made about this experiment, for example:
Quote:
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What I’m really enthused about is the number of folks who actually get it. This whole challenge isn’t just about getting enough money to write a sequel. It’s about making a fundamental change in the way publishing is done. Instead of getting paid by publishers for what they guess I might sell in the future, I can work on the basis of being paid for work I’ve already done. The advantage there is incredible because it buys me the freedom to turn out the kind of work that I want to write and which, rather obviously, my patrons (that would be you) want to read. With this cycle ramping up, I’d be in a position to ask you what you want to see next from me, be it more DragonCrown War material, more stories in the Age of Discovery world, long work, short work, new and experimental work.
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I strongly encourage you to have a look at his full comments on the
Talion experiment,
here and
here, and also his comments on
Once A Hero, located
here. Not only are they interesting for their perspective on e-publishing, but they offer some interesting tidbits on the histories of the books in question.
For those interested, I encourage you to consider purchasing one or both of these books. I haven't read
Once a Hero (yet!) but everything else I've read by Mr. Stackpole I've greatly enjoyed, so I have no reservations about commending his works to you. For those who would specifically like to see a
Talion sequel, here's something you can do to make that more likely.
For everyone, what do you think of Mr. Stackpole's perspective on e-publishing? He seems to be viewing it from a slightly different direction than I'd ever considered before, and one I think will be particularly appealing to other Authors.