Does Online Fiction Work?
Those who have been around the Internet writing communities will be quick to tell you that the answer is "No." They'll point to self-published poetry on a Geocities Web site that gets twenty page views a month. They'll mention fiction-centric sites like Mind's Eye that had trouble making the ad-sponsored concept profitable for short fiction. They'll bring up the difficulty of generating Web traffic for any new site.
Granted. Those models don't work. Draw those same examples back into the magazine analogy and you'll quickly see why. Online fiction needs established traffic and a flowing revenue stream to support it.
Content, Meet Content Provider
When HappyHacker.org arranged to publish THE HERETIC online, the site already had steady traffic, an established following, and an existing advertising revenue stream. The content of the novel and the content of the site are a good match. It seems only natural that a computer security-oriented Web site would be interested in publishing a cyber-thriller. A royalty arrangement based on the ad revenue generated from the novel's pages sealed the deal.
So far, the novel has racked up over 500,000 page views. The royalty model is hurt some by Web cache systems and by readers who choose to surf with images disabled (filtering out the ads), but overall it works. The rest of the Happy Hacker site has maintained it's traffic level, so the novel's readership represents a net gain of 15% to 20% in traffic.
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