Writer's Report 2.0

Stephen King was the first prominent, best-selling author to exclusively publish a novella in the e-book format. He believed it would be a growing industry, but not that it would ever replace real books. He met with limited success.

Now King is back with his e-book only novella “UR”. Its release coincided with the launch of Amazon’s upgraded Kindle 2 reader.

In 2000, in the early years of e-books, King’s novella Riding the Bullet was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, the load overwhelming all online sites offering it. Although it seemed a little dated then, I still liked it.

He followed that with the story The Plant. King offered the book in unencrypted installments. He requested that people use the honor system and pay one-dollar for each installment. He warned that he’d drop the project if the percentage of paying readers fell below 75 percent.

The percentage of paying customers dropped and true to his word, the project stopped after six installments – the story incomplete.

King said there would be more, but that other projects needed to be finished first. To date there has been no further mention of the story. Too bad, I was into the story when it stopped. Yes, I paid, but only for the first three installments. I thought it was an inefficient, pain-in-the-ass way to pay for a story.

Currently, “UR” is ranked No. 11 on Amazon’s list of Kindle best-sellers and is available as a download for $2.99. It’s about a college English instructor whose pink Kindle allows him to access new books by famous dead authors as well as newspapers that tell of a future event that he is compelled to try to forestall. Some readers have likened the book to an infomercial for the pricey e-book reader.

The Kindle 2 is a slimmed-down model of the original with upgraded components and storage capacity. It went on sale Feb. 9 for $359.

The device downloads books, newspaper stories and blog posts over a wireless network.

At a time when the book industry is going through tough times, it was reported this e-book was released to “create some excitement” in electronic publishing. Although the Kindle and competing devices account for no more than 1 percent of overall book sales, I can tell you the younger generations are going to continue to adapt to this format over traditional book over time.

King sees the Kindle as a delivery system that matters less than the story it delivers. Last year, King wrote in his blog, on the Entertainment Weekly site, the Kindle will not replace books, that there’s a “…a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them…”

But they can, he wrote, enrich a reader’s life.

“For a while I was very aware that I was looking at a screen and bopping a button instead of turning pages. Then the story simply swallowed me, as the good ones always do,” King wrote. “It became about the message instead of the medium, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

In an interview article in USA WEEKEND to be released March 6th, Stephen King was asked if his mainstream success over the past 35 years paved the way for the successful careers of Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga)author Stephenie Meyer. He dishes out some hefty criticism about the most bankable author since J.K. Rowling, and offers his opinions on a couple of other well known writer’s.

USA WEEKEND
By Brian Truitt

(King) said he doesn’t know how much of an influence he had on Meyer, but he does know that Rowling read his stuff when she was younger. “I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me,” King explains.

“People always say to me, ‘Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?’ And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, ‘This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.’ I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

But then King recalls that when his mom was alive, she read all the Erle Stanley Gardner books, the Perry Mason mysteries, obsessively when he was growing up. “He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful,” King says. “Somebody who’s a terrific writer who’s been very, very successful is Jodi Picoult. You’ve got Dean Koontz, who can write like hell. And then sometimes he’s just awful. It varies. James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very very successful. People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.”

Associated Press

Stephen King is a video star.

The animated video adaptation of the horror master’s short story “N.” has been viewed more than a 1 million times on the Internet and on mobile phones since its release in July, according to publisher Simon & Schuster. King has well demonstrated his digital appeal before; his e-novella “Riding the Bullet” was a sensation in the early years of the Internet.

“Stephen King has once again lured his readers to try a new way to enjoy a story,” Susan Moldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, said Thursday in a statement.

The print version of King’s short story, in which a psychiatrist fatally absorbs the madness of one of his patients, is included in the collection “Just After Sunset,” released this week.

You can find all 25 Episodes of “N.” at: www.Nishere.com

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My brother-in-law and I showed up at the Harvard Book Store around 6:00 PM to pick up our tickets and complimentary copy of The Best American Short Stories 2007, only to find they already moved them to the First Parish Church Meetinghouse in the Harvard campus.

We went over and waited on a not too long line. I was surprised on how far some people came out for this event. A couple in front of me came all the way from Pennsylvania just for this. We were let into the church around 7:00 PM, got our tickets and book and chose what we thought to be pretty good seats.

We spent our time making small talk with the people around us or reading the book we were given. I was bummed to learn no photographs were allowed and that since there were a thousand people in attendance they were only going to sign the book that was given us and no other.

The meeting started almost twenty minutes late, but finally the panel of speakers arrived. Stephen King was dressed in a light weave black sweater and jeans. He led a group of four other people who we were to learn are Jim Shepard, Karen Russell, Richard Russo and Heidi Pitlor. All were wearing some sort of black shirt or sweater – must be some sort of published writer ‘thang’.

Stephen gave a short talk, with his typical Down East wit and accent, on the health of the American short story and what it took to come up with the 20 stories selected out of the 4,000 he and Heidi Pitlor read. Next, each of the guest writers read a 5-minute excerpt of their story out of the book, then the panel spent some time answering questions – in which they elaborated on some in great detail.

One young woman asked “What advice you would give to a young writer that wants to get published.” I know Stephen King hears this same question thousands of times a year and it showed. He seemed put-off and bored with the question and just answered curtly, “Read a lot, write a lot.” I know the young woman was hoping for some sort of gem, but King cut right to the bone and told her what she needed to hear.

Being a complete noob to this sort of forum, what happened next took me by surprise. Here I am thinking, I am in a good spot, I am pretty close to the panel of writers and therefore, when they start calling rows for the book signing, it won’t be too long before I get to meet Mr. King up close and personal. I even had a quick couple of lines rehearsed to say to Mr. King that would sound new and refreshing to him and not the same old, “I’m your biggest fan, I’ve read everything you ever wrote…blah, blah, blah”.

While the questioning went on, I noticed people begin to get up and leave the church. The coordinator of the event said they were running short on time and the next person would have the last question. As soon as she said that I noticed a lot of people drift down the aisle to my left and begin to line up. I’m still thinking, “Hey, they’re not from the rows in front of me.” I began to realize this was to be a free for all line up. What happened next looked like it came right out of a movie or sitcom. As the last question was asked, I looked down to gather my things and tell my brother-in-law that I think we better line up, when I heard a rumbling as though from herd cattle with padded hooves. I looked up and saw the line, that had just seconds before held only about a dozen people, now extended to the back of the church and out the open front door.

I was so pissed at myself for not acting sooner. The panel discussion ended, we got up and followed the crowd outside. The line extended down the front stairs and extended down the walkway. Right there and then we decided we were not going to wait around on this line for a couple of hours to get the book signed.

I may not have been able to meet Steve King up close and personal or get the book signed, but I definitely know what to expect and look for when I go back next week to see Bill Bryson talk about his nostalgically funny The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir