Michael Stackpole, a well-known author to Star Wars and BattleTech fans, has been aware of e-books for a long time. Back in 2000, he wrote an iconic essay on e-book piracy and arguments in justification thereof. More recently, he wrote that fears of piracy should not scare new authors away from digital publishing, and that authors should not fear universally compatible e-books replacing multiple sales.
Now a MobileRead forum poster notes that Stackpole is issuing an “e-book challenge” to his readers. He is offering two of his backlist novels—Once a Hero and Talion: Revenant—as DRM-free EPUB books from his website store for $5 each. The challenge is that if Talion: Revenant sells 10,000 e-book copies—the same number it sold in print—he will write the sequel, Talion: Nemesis.
Stackpole wrote:
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.
This challenge idea has some similarities to the Storyteller’s Bowl model, which has worked for other writers. In a way, I guess it’s applying the model on a per-book rather than a per-chapter basis.
As of July 2nd, three months after making the e-book available, Talion: Revenant had only sold 210 e-book copies. But Stackpole noted that sales were gathering momentum, and was still hopeful of reaching the goal.
I’m always glad to see more of this sort of experimentation. The best way to move the state of the e-book market forward is to try as many different approaches as possible—the more approaches that are tried, the more that have a chance to work.
