The Vibrant Channeled Creator

It isn’t just his productivity that has made King one of the top-earning authors in the world. He has been years ahead of other writers on technology — in 2000, he started publishing some of his work online only, at a time when e-books were virtually unknown. He routinely turns down big advances, but instead of royalties, he splits the profits from his books 50-50 with the publishers. And while most publishers purchase book rights for 70 years after the author’s death, King allows them just 15 years after publication, which guarantees that the publishers work hard to sell his books, since he can find someone else if the deal isn’t working.
King’s novels include Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Cujo (1981), Pet Sematary (1993), It (1986), The Green Mile (2000), the Dark Tower series (1982-2012), and published this month, Doctor Sleep (2013).
King said, “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”
And he said: “I just write about what scares me. When I was a kid, my mother used to say, ‘Think of the worst thing that you can, and if you say it out loud then it won’t come true.’ And that’s probably been the basis of my career.”