Stephen King To Provide More Online Content

Posted on February 26, 2001

Stephen King is returning to the Web to provide more online content. This time he is offering three free 3,000 word excerpts from his upcoming novel Dreamcatcher. The three installments will be published on Time.com's website on March 5, March 12 and March 19. Dreamcatcher will be available in stores on March 20th.

Simon & Schuster, Stephen King's publisher, gave Time, Inc. permission to use the three excerpts free of charge. Time will also include a quiz where readers can win a chance to win a personally inscribed copy of Dreamcatcher.

Dreamcatcher is the story of four childhood friends, now adults, who go hunting together every winter in the snowy woods of Maine. But this year is different, as a delirious stranger stumbles into their camp changing each of their lives forever. Before long, each of these men will be plunged into a horrifying struggle with another world, and their only chance of survival involves a story from their shared past.

Stephen King's other online publishing adventures include The Plant, which was offered in several installments for $1.00 each and Riding the Bullet, an ebook. Amazon.com assisted King in collecting funds for downloads of The Plant, his online self-publishing project, by lending the author the use of its credit card payment technology. King benefited because he had a way to collect money and Amazon.com benefited by collecting new customers. Readers were not forced to pay, however, many were willing to pay a $1.00 fee in an online publishing bid that paid off handsomely for author Stephen King. King dubbed the method the "Honor System", a terminology that Amazon.com recently began using itself -- with the release of the Amazon Honor Payment System, where Amazon.com lends the use of its 1-click payment technology to other websites in return for transaction fees. King's first online publishing success was Riding the Bullet, an ebook that was delivered free online resulting in hundreds of thousands of downloads which backlogged web servers at online retailers including Barnes & Noble.com.