John August (screenwriter of Go, Big Fish and more) has a new short story available on his site. It's 25 pages, and it'll cost you $0.99. Wait, what's that? Something that isn't free on the Internet? Do tell.
He's taken his time to write 7,176 words of fiction, roughly 23 pages of content. iTunes has created a price point for disposable yet keepable entertainment, so that's the model he's following. Maybe it's an experiment, maybe he just needs to be compensated something since he could have been script doctoring or writing a screenplay that would pay him much more. And there's all that free advice for writers on his site...
I'm curious to see where this is going. With the proliferation of the Kindle and other e-reader devices making it not only easy and convenient to purchase books, but also keeping the costs lower/rather uniform, we're bound to see a lot more of this. How many novels would I buy if they were all $1? Less than $5? I don't have the answers, but someone definitely needs to be asking the question.
You can check out the first 13 pages (or more than half for those keeping score at home) of Variant HERE. I plan to. And I may even pay the $0.99 to get my hands on the whole thing if I like it. It's cheap enough... Although my gut reaction was the same as most people's I would imagine. Whu?? How come this ain't being free to me? Gimme! Some people at least...
Very curious about where this leads.
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