Interviews & Essays
PW Talks with Ralph Vincinanza
Ralph Vicinanza is the literary agent who arranged for the e-publication of
Stephen King's Riding the Bullet.
PW: Why is Stephen King publishing an e-book?
RV: We had planned, in 1999, on my doing a deal for the electronic publication of a bridge story between The Talisman and that novel's sequel, which Peter Straub and Stephen King are writing now. I think we'll still go forward with that. But I would like to see that done closer to when the book will be published, which probably won't happen until mid-2001. So I said to Steve, "It would be nice to get an idea of what this market is like now." He said, "Let me think about it," and then he came back the next day and said, "I think I have a story that's perfect for this." I thought it was a really good story in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of length. I didn't want something that would overwhelm the reader, and its length is one reason why we were able to put such a nice price on it. We don't want the price to be any kind of a barrier-and there were no production costs.
PW: It's no surprise that it's Stephen King who's the first really
high-profile author to publish electronically. But it is a bit surprising to
see S&S involved. Why didn't he go to a bona fide e-publisher, or publish
the story on his own?
RV: That was my call. I have been taking meetings with a number of e-book publishers and people who have Web sites. Stephen King has credibility. Stephen King has a huge readership and a cachet all his own. He's a brand name. Many of these companies are new companies-even the ones that have considerable financing are new companies. If Stephen King chose one over the other, that would give that one an imprimatur that may not be deserved. We don't know how this technology is going to pan out. There are lots of people who would pay enormous amounts of money to attract King to do business with them. I have been in meetings where CEOs have said to me, "We will give him 40% or 50% of our stock just to have a regular business with him." But that's not what we were interested in. We were interested in being published electronically in all of the various formats available on all of the various platforms. And S&S has been very aggressive in pursuing relationships with these people. It's important that people don't allow their paranoia to get the best of them. Electronic books and downloading from the Internet is a new and exciting way to present writers. I don't think it's going to destroy the publishing industry. It's very much like the development of the mass-market paperback. Hardcover publishers went crazy back then, thinking, "Oh my God, we're going to be run out of business." You were going to have the same books out there for very cheap prices. But that's not what happened.
PW: But there is a major difference. Now any author can go and post material online, for almost cost.
RV: The problem with any author publishing on the Web is, how do you get readers to go to that Web site? I think that publishers will remain very important as portals, saying, "We offer books by...." Authors like Stephen King and John Grisham and Tom Clancy are in a unique position in the sense that they are portals themselves. It won't surprise
anyone to hear that these men, through their writing, have earned enough money to buy publishers if they really wanted to do it themselves. I don't think Stephen King wants to be a publisher. I think that, if he'd wanted to, he would have been able to buy Putnam several years ago, and not have Pearson buy Putnam.
PW: Riding the Bullet is encrypted so that it not only can't be copied, it can't be printed out. Why?
RV: On the Web, you can download material, copy it and send it to hundreds of people. The purpose of the encryption is that, when the material is downloaded, if I try to send it on to someone else, or have somebody download it into their own e-reader or Palm, or to print it out, the file will know that it's been downloaded already, and will corrupt.
PW: I wonder how long it will take before the story appears illicitly on the Web. Because you know someone can have it on their Rocket and type it from there on to their laptop.
RV: You can do that with a short story now. And people have. The law eventually will have to monitor activity like that. But right now, for somebody to sit down, and to spend an hour or two typing it, rather than spending $2.50--I wouldn't get that. We want everybody involved with electronic books to enjoy this. I think it's going to be a tremendous boost in the arm for this industry.
Read an Excerpt
I've never told anyone this story, and never thought I would -- not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed...and because it was mine. I've always felt that telling it would cheapen both me and the story itself, make it smaller and more mundane, no more than a camp counselor's ghost story told before lights-out. I think I was also afraid that if I told it, heard it with my own ears, I might start to disbelieve it myself. But since my mother died I haven't been able to sleep very well. I doze off and then snap back again, wide awake and shivering. Leaving the bedside lamp on helps, but not as much as you might think. There are so many more shadows at night, have you ever noticed that? Even with a light on there are so many shadows. The long ones could be the shadows of anything, you thi
Anything at all.
I was a junior at the University of Maine when Mrs. McCurdy called about ma. My father died when I was too young to remember him and I was an only child, so it was just Alan and Jean Parker against the world. Mrs. McCurdy, who lived just up the road, called at the apartment I shared with three other guys. She had gotten the number off the magnetic minder-board ma kept on her fridge.
"'Twas a stroke," she said in that long and drawling Yankee accent of hers. "Happened at the restaurant. But don't you go flyin off all half-cocked. Doctor says it wa'ant too bad. She's awake and she's talkin."
"Yeah, but is she making sense?" I asked. I was trying to sound calm, even amused, but my heart was beating fast and the living room suddenly felt too warm. I had the apartment all to myself; it was Wednesday, and both my roomies had classes all day.
"Oh, ayuh. First thing she said was for me to call you but not to scare you. That's pretty sensible, wouldn't you say?"
"Yeah." But of course I was scared. When someone calls and tells you your mother's been taken from work to the hospital in an ambulance, how else are you supposed to feel?
"She said for you to stay right there and mind your schoolin until the weekend. She said you could come then, if you didn't have too much studyin t'do."
Sure, I thought. Fat chance. I'd just stay here in this ratty, beer-smelling apartment while my mother lay in a hospital bed a hundred miles south, maybe dying.
"She's still a young woman, your ma," Mrs. McCurdy said. "It's just that she's let herself get awful heavy these last few years, and she's got the hypertension. Plus the cigarettes. She's goin to have to give up the smokes."
I doubted if she would, though, stroke or no stroke, and about that I was right -- my mother loved her smokes. I thanked Mrs. McCurdy for calling.
"First thing I did when I got home," she said. "So when are you coming, Alan? Sad'dy?" There was a sly note in her voice that suggested she knew better.
I looked out the window at a perfect afternoon in October: bright blue New England sky over trees that were shaking down their yellow leaves onto Mill Street. Then I glanced at my watch. Twenty past three. I'd just been on my way out to my four o'clock philosophy seminar when the phone rang.
"You kidding?" I asked. "I'll be there tonight."
Her laughter was dry and a little cracked around the edges -- Mrs. McCurdy was a great one to talk about giving up the cigarettes, her and her Winstons. "Good boy! You'll go straight to the hospital, won't you, then drive out to the house?"
"I guess so, yeah," I said. I saw no sense in telling Mrs. McCurdy that there was something wrong with the transmission of my old car, and it wasn't going anywhere but the driveway for the foreseeable future. I'd hitchhike down to Lewiston, then out to our little house in Harlow if it wasn't too late. If it was, I'd snooze in one of the hospital lounges. It wouldn't be the first time I'd ridden my thumb home from school. Or slept sitting up with my head leaning against a Coke machine, for that matter.
"I'll make sure the key's under the red wheelbarrow," she said. "You know where I mean, don't you?"
"Sure." My mother kept an old red wheelbarrow by the door to the back shed; in the summer it foamed with flowers. Thinking of it for some reason brought Mrs. McCurdy's news home to me as a true fact: my mother was in the hospital, the little house in Harlow where I'd grown up was going to be dark tonight -- there was no one there to turn on the lights after the sun went down. Mrs. McCurdy could say she was young, but when you're just twenty-one yourself, forty-eight seems ancient.
"Be careful, Alan. Don't speed."
My speed, of course, would be up to whoever I hooked a ride with, and I personally hoped that whoever it was would go like hell. As far as I was concerned, I couldn't get to Central Maine Medical Center fast enough. Still, there was no sense worrying Mrs. McCurdy.
"I won't. Thanks."
"Welcome," she said. "Your ma's going to be just fine. And won't she be some happy to see you."
I hung up, then scribbled a note saying what had happened and where I was going. I asked Hector Passmore, the more responsible of my roommates, to call my adviser and ask him to tell my instructors what was up so I wouldn't get whacked for cutting -- two or three of my teachers were real bears about that. Then I stuffed a change of clothes into my backpack, added my dog-eared copy of Introduction to Philosophy, and headed out. I dropped the course the following week, although I had been doing quite well in it. The way I looked at the world changed that night, changed quite a lot, and nothing in my philosophy textbook seemed to fit the changes. I came to understand that there are things underneath, you see -- underneath -- and no book can explain what they are. I think that sometimes it's best to just forget those things are there. If you can, that is.
Copyright © 2000 by Stephen King
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