I Heard It On The Grapevine... (The Plant - Stephen King)

Member Name: assethound

Product:	The Plant - Stephen King
Date:	20/09/00 (93 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A plan(t) to undermine the publishing world

Disadvantages: A plan(t) to undermine the publishing world

Stephen King is arguably the world’s most successful author, with 36 novels under his belt, many of which have been made into movies, and an annual income of $40m. It is no wonder then that an author this successful has decided to try cutting out the middleman, and self-publish a novel on the internet through his own publishing house, based in Bangor, Maine: the Philtrum Press.

If this experiment works, it could revolutionise the way books are sold in the future. Already we can buy hard copy books through web sites like www.amazon.co.uk and .com, and www.ottakars.co.uk, and even ebooks, for reading on a computer in PDF format or HTML, or for reading on electronic reading devices such as the Rocket eBook Pro, in the form of Rocket Editions. I suspect that it will be only a matter of time before Britain catches up with the States and has dedicated reading devices on sale in bookshops, capable of storing dozens of ebooks at a time. Stephen King is the first major author to try such an experiment, but there are many others self-publishing, and publishing through electronic publishing firms already.

The Plant is not King’s first foray into headline grabbing ebook publishing. His publishers, Simon & Shuster, published the short ghost story Riding The Bullet in an encrypted ebook form on March 14th this year for $2.95 online, with some web sites offering it free. It sold more than 500,000 copies, most of these in the first day, and led to sites crashing with the sheer volume of demand.

The big difference with The Plant, is that it is available for download in an unencrypted form, and through an “honour” system, whereby you can download the instalments for free, and King trusts you to return and pay for it. To counter the obvious risk of everyone downloading The Plant bit by bit without ever paying for it, he states on his web site www.stephenking.com that he will stop writing and publishing The Plant after the thi
rd instalment if less than 75% of downloads are paid for. At $1 (approximately 71p) per download it would seem a little churlish to refuse, especially if by defying the publishing industry King opens the way for better deals for authors. Only time will tell whether King’s foray into self-publishing will have an effect. If it does, the question must be - is this better for authors ion the long run? After all, King would not have got where he is today without the infrastructure and marketing skills of the publishing industry, would he?

The main question is, of course, is the tale worth telling? On balance I would say that The Plant is definitely worth a look, if only to see if it will develop into as good a novel as King is capable of . King uses the epistolary style for the telling of this tale, which put simply, is in the form of a series of letters, augmented in this case with memos. Although this can seem like a slow moving method of telling a story, it is an ideal form for creating suspense, and for developing character, as can be seen in Alice Walker epistolary novel, the Color Purple. There is also a connection with religion: the word epistolary comes from epistle, as Chambers Dictionary notes “esp(ecially) a letter to an individual or church from an apostle” (my parentheses). Given one of the main characters self-confessed involvement with the black arts, I believe that this epistolary form could be a very significant choice. So far I have read the first two instalments, and would rate it as a little below King's usual high standards, although it is hard to tell what it will be like as a whole novel (if the whole book is eventually published). This is partly due to the epistolary form that King has chose for this novel, which whilst giving an insight into each character, can make the action seem at a remove from the reader. Hopefully it will start as a slow burn and gain a little more impetus with each instalment.
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The novel starts in January 1981, with a query letter from Carlos Detweiller of Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the Zenith House publishing company of New York. Detweiller’s letter outlines a book he has written, True Tales of Demon Possession, and is taken by John Kenton, an editor at Zenith House, to be the work of “a ding dong”. In spit of this, and in view of the dire straits that Zenith House is in, he writes back to Detweiller, requesting a more detailed synopsis of the book, and the first three chapters., with the reasoning that at least if Detweiller has completed his book it will be possible to have it ghost written to overcome any dire deficiencies in grammar and structure. A few days later, a second letter turns up from Detweiller, followed by the full manuscript of True Tales of Demon Possession. I will leave it there, with the teaser that Detweiller may not be what he seems, and that Kenton may live (if he is lucky) to regret encouraging the young “gonzo illiterate”, and “obviously mad Carlos Detweiller”...

The Plant, instalments 1 and 2 can be downloaded from www.stephenking.com/download.html. Instalment 3 will be available for download on 25th September.


Web sites of interest:

www.stephenking.com - The Official Stephen King Web Prescence.
www.stephenking.com/download.html - Download The Plant from here.
www.spinejar.webjump.com/ - Spinejar! Stephen King ezine.
www.utopianweb.com/king/ - see this Stephen King Web Site for up to date information and a very good links page.
www.observer.co.uk/stephenking/story/0,7763,36 8455,00.html - links to an interview with Stephen King in The Observer. A three part series is currently running in the Observer on King, this started on Sunday 17th September 2000.
www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/kin g000724.html - link to an interview with King on Good morning America.

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