> As the going wisdom states: it only takes 1,000 true fans spending $100/year for a creator to earn a salary of $100,000/year—and there are 83,397 books every year that have at least 1,000 true fans. Theoretically then, an author could release a new chapter every week, charge subscribers $8 or $9 a month, and earn $100,000 a year—from only 1,000 readers.
She's basically proposing an episodic model for books, with each chapter being released individually.
I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters. Or long delays. Episodic gaming was a big hype in the game industry for a while but it suffered really heavily from these issues and it's now pretty much defunct. A few companies like telltale made it work but even telltale is now out of business. The 'early access' model was also tried there but is failing for similar reasons: There is no incentive to ever finishing a game, in fact the incentive is to never finish it.
It also means you'd be spending $100 on a single book. In this model you pay $8-$9 a chapter, normally this is the price you'd pay for an entire book. I also wouldn't want to wait for the next chapter every time. I don't see this working out at all.
I don't know what the answer is. But I don't think this is it.
Edit: As many people have pointed out this model has been around much longer, even before the internet... I didn't know that and thanks for pointing it out! I still don't think it will work for me as a reader though. I view a book as a unit, and having reading sprints of a few hours per month will dilute the story for me.