The Internet Writer's Handbook

The Internet offers writers several new market opportunities. You can sell your work directly off your own website. Alternatively, you can place titles with distributors like Fatbrain and split the proceeds. There are also electronic versions of conventional publishers who will pay you royalties up to fifty percent.

You can produce your work on disk, in print-on-demand (POD) or as downloadable E-books. It's a new medium, and these novelties are still being tested. E-zines are well under way as mass circulation publishing vehicles. They are cheap to produce, easy to disseminate, and they present no problems to either publisher or authors - just so long as you don't expect to make much money from them. E-books are the same - but they generally have bigger aspirations.


There are several different formats - from plain text files, through HTML web pages, to PDF files which capture all the typographical niceties of pages which can be printed if necessary. In addition to this there are the new proprietary formats developed by Microsoft, Glassbook and Rocketbook for their E-book readers.

Karen Scott's handbook is a detailed guide to publishers of the two formats which are most digital - e-zines and e-books. Her listings are wide-ranging and very thorough - with plenty of detail on how to target and submit your work , how much they pay, and even how they are most likely to respond.

The topics these publishers cover range from poetry and fiction, through non-fiction feature writing, to specialist publications for people such as rock climbers and financial advisors. The rates they pay vary from nothing (of course) for poetry and short stories, up to US $250 per 1,000 words for in-flight magazine features.

On e-books she also offers a good survey of all the Readers available. These are the hand-held devices you can take to the beach or to bed to do your reading. She also includes sections on copyright and e-book contracts, how to use search engines, a list of competitions, and a survey of recent developments in the world of publishing.

The listings of e-publishers at first glance appear rather dry, but they are the most valuable part of the book - the very thing which enrich its value as a resource. If you plan to put your work on the Internet, either with a publisher, an agency, or your own website, this book is a sound investment.