Stephen King's New Work Hits the Web

July 24 -- It sounds like a publisher’s nightmare, but the King of horror says they shouldn’t be concerned by his latest Internet milestone.

“I love my editors, and I like my publisher,” says Stephen King, who has just released the first chapter of a Web-only — and publisher-free — work. “I also like books. I’m a conservative on this particular subject and I love the smell of glue.”

King says on his Web site that he hopes his new cyberspace experiment, in which readers are asked to pay a dollar per chapter, will instead help other writers.

“[I]f I could break some trail for all the midlist writers, literary writers, and just plain marginalized writers who see a future outside the mainstream, that’s great,” he wrote. “My friends, we have a chance to become Big Publishing’s worst nightmare.”

Will It Work?

But some publishers doubt that King’s experiment, called The Plant, can help lesser-known scribes.

“This may work for Stephen King, but it won’t work for 99 percent of the people out there,” says Larry Kirshbaum, president of Time Warner Trade Publishing.

“You still need a lot of money and power to promote a book,” notes Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers’ Union. “The same people who already make a good living at the top of the bestseller list may have another way to sell, but I don’t believe there will be a dramatic change for other authors.”

One major publishing house saw the move as more of a challenge than a threat.

“It writes in the largest possible letters that publishers must prove their value in finding an author his or her audience and doing it better than the author can do it by his or herself,” says Simon & Schuster president Carolyn Reidy.

Simon & Schuster worked with King on his previous e-book, Riding the Bullet, which was released in March and has sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the most successful e-book ever. Reidy did not sound alarmed by King’s latest move.