Jack William Bell's Journal: Metamorphosis of the Prime Tip Jar

Roger Williams has posted a well thought-out article on K5 detailing the results of publishing his novel 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect' on the Internet. In a nutshell; he got a lot of readers, but they didn't come through with the tips...

I find Roger's experiment (and similar efforts by Cory Doctorow and Eric Flint) very interesting because I am considering a project of my own along the same lines. Albeit, with some fairly major differences built around my perceptions of what works on the Internet versus what doesn't. To that end I have formulated the following rules (nearly all of which Roger violated in his experiment):

• Don't publish the whole thing in one chunk; use a serialized format designed to keep them coming back at regular intervals (as most webcomics do)
• Don't rely on one revenue source; take a shotgun approach using tip jars, advertising, merchandising and anything else you can think of
• Use every opportunity to plug the website (Roger actually did pretty good at this one)
• Work out cross-advertising deals with similar projects
• Try to make the website more 'sticky' by providing comment pages, easy chat rooms and/or a mailing list -- something to allow readers to interact

Of course none of the above means a thing if the actual product (the novel) is a piece of crap. Roger is estimating he got in the neighborhood of 5,000 to 10,000 readers, which is actually pretty good for a first novel. If he had gotten a buck from each one he would have done as well as a standard first advance! Personally I am not going forward with my project without some assurance that my work is good enough to get at least half that number of readers.