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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
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Brenna: Am I bashing film? Maybe so.
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Kennedy: The only problem I have about publishing on the Net is the question of copyright, and I have yet to obtain a satisfactory response about the implications involved. When you publish a story in a print periodical you usually sell one-time rights, and if there is a press run of say 5,000 copies, that´s it. Of course, the story continues to exist in each of those 5,000 copies, even as they are remaindered or tossed into second-hand bookshop bins, god bless ´em, or illegally photocopied for classroom use. But when you publish a story online it would appear that it is there forever, accessible to anyone with the necessary electronic equipment to click it forth. So one time rights suddenly means forever and everywhere in the world. I am very jealous of my copyrights. With one exception, I own every story I have ever written, and I like it that way. I know that wonderful things are happening on the Net in terms of literature--just take a look at Mike Neff´s fabulous Webdelsol (www.webdelsol.com) for example with all its many many links and connections. Maybe the Internet will change the idea of ownership of what we write and make us all noncommercial in the end, return us to the sacred sense of language when the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. What´s John Grisham gonna do then, huh?
Frank: Maybe we should ask him? I´m sending an email to him now. We´ll see what comes back? There are lots of other models though to consider or invent, and some may be in the greater interest of literature and serious writers. Others, less so. Stephen King, whom we´ve already mentioned, recently sold chapters of a new book in progress for a buck a chapter, delivered as email. The idea is inviting. The problem is that King already has a huge readership and the ability to promote such innovations on the front page of daily newspapers, something that the rest of can´t do. The result is that King ends up making lots more money by cutting out the publisher and the bookseller, and in the end, the mega author comes to resemble the huge chain or the corporate publisher, hardly friends to more literary work by lesser-known authors.
Kennedy: But the King project failed, didn´t it? He had to close it down before the end of the book for lack of sufficient subscribers.
Brenna: Survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism, I tell you. Just kidding. Sort of.
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