Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Lawrence Watt-Evans and payment on the instalment plan

Back in May I mentioned Lawrence Watt-Evans, who had made the painful discovery that no mainstream publisher was interested in the ninth volume of his Legends of Ethshar series. So Lawrence decided that he would offer the book online; and he would write a chapter a week, just so long as there were enough readers willing to pay him a total of $100 a week to do the job.

Well, even to the author's own surprise, it turned out that there were enough fans to support this proposal, and you can read all about it at The Spriggan Mirror. You can even read the book for free now, though you'd better get on with it because Lawrence has had an offer from an e-publisher.

Whether inspired by Lawrence Watt-Evans's example I know not, but over at Out of Ambit, Diane Duane (13 December Straw Poll, and 15 December Astonishment) is speculating about doing something similar.

Thanks to Carole Nadin for pointing all this out.

Incidentally, for a writer, Diane's blog is very hi-techie indeed.

1 comment:

Anne Weale said...

Unfortunately Diane's blog is so high tech that on my 44 kps dial-up connection it took almost 3 minutes to download. I waited, but most people with slow connections wouldn't. The whole world is not on broadband yet.

Anne