Even Stephen King couldn’t get readers to pay for a novel via the Internet. So what hope is there for the rest of us?

This is a question I’ve pondered a lot lately, as it looks more and more as if the future of independent publishing is in serious doubt. (The IPA collapse, the PGW mess, independent bookstores screwed, the Time Warner scheme to destroy indy magazines, etc.) It would be awesome if there were more viable revenue models for publishing online. (I know it’s more viable than it used to be, at least partly because some of other’s former advertisers have told us they’re moving most of their ad money from print to online venues.)

So I’m intrigued to see whether Bill Kte’pi’s gamble will pay off. Kte’pi has a novel, The Saint of Daybreak, which he couldn’t get a mainstream book deal for. So instead he’s serializing it on his web site. And he has an interesting business model, different from King’s and possibly unique.

He’s posted the first chapter for free. He’ll post the second chapter as soon as he gets $20 worth of donations (via PayPal). And each chapter after that, he’ll post as soon as he gets $40 worth of donations. I’m guessing he doesn’t care how big the donations are, as long as they add up to $40. With 25 chapters, my back-of-the-envelope calculation says he stands to make $940 off this book. Not a fortune, but more than some small presses would pay. And better than nothing, which is what he’d get if he didn’t publish it at all.

The real question is not just whether he’ll get the donations, but how fast he’ll get them. If people have to wait weeks between chapters, that could dampen their enthusiasm for the project. And it’s possible he’ll get enough donations early enough to post the first few chapters relatively speedily, but then it’ll languish. The optimistic scenario is it’ll snowball as people tell their friends and more people visit the site.

It’s an interesting model, anyway. The only drawback is that I don’t think I’m interested in reading The Saint of Daybreak, for the same reason publishers weren’t interested in it:

Because it’s about vampires, and the plot involves a church conspiracy, which makes it slightly too similar to The Da Vinci Code (though the nature of the conspiracy is entirely different).