Published Books by Michael Martinez
Parma Endorion, Part Three

Page 1    Page 2    Page 3    The Anglo-Saxon Myth

"I have to credit Angela Gunn of Yahoo! Internet Life with some of the credit for our success," Michael says. "Her Web article about popular Tolkien sites had sparked intense interest in Parma Endorion. We probably would have enjoyed considerable success without her approving comments (about the Web site), but I think YIL gave us a credibility we would have lacked otherwise. People said, 'Yeah, this is a cool thing.' Besides which, no one else had done a real Tolkien eBook, except New Line Cinema. There was Brian Crawford's Isildur novel and other fan fiction, but these were largely text files downloaded in .ZIP format. People had come to expect a minimum visual standard in eBooks. Matt's design and hard work paid off. Rich and Anke's artwork made the book just that much more interesting, too."

By the end of 2003, there had been more than 500,000 downloads of Parma Endorion from Free-Ebooks.Net. The eBook has been pirated on the Kazaa network and in binary news groups. It has also been sold to unsuspecting readers on eBay. "The people at eBay have created a ridiculous policy requiring authors to jump through amazing hoops," Michael notes, "but we have generally been able to stop the eBay auctions when they are brought to our attention. There will always be an unscrupulous person out there, trying to make a buck off a free resource. But we have had good support from the Tolkien fan community." When the first eBay auctions were discovered, TheOneRing.Net and Tolkien Online, as well as other prominent sites, carried a press release warning their visitors not to bid on the eBook. They all linked to the Free-eBooks.net download location. "That inevitably helped us surge forward," Michael concedes. "We had good momentum, but suddenly Parma Endorion was news and everyone wanted to read this free eBook which was being pirated."

Other sites have begun carrying the eBook. MERP.COM, a popular role-playing Web resource asked for permission to distribute Parma Endorion. But some distributors have never notified Michael or anyone of their use of the eBook. "It's discourteous, but as long as they don't alter it or sell it, I won't object," Michael says. "It would be nice to have comprehensive statistics for the downloads, but I am sure that Eva's site has generated the most downloads."

And speaking of Free-Ebooks.Net, don't dedicated servers cost money? "Indeed, Eva has borne the real expense of this project," Michael adds. "I asked her once how she could afford to do so. She told me that the increased traffic on her network was producing significant revenue increases. It was a boon none of us expected. Parma Endorion has helped introduce hundreds of thousands of people to the world of eBooks. That can only be a good thing in the long run, and I am glad Eva has been compensated for her contributions. I wish now, in retrospect, that we had sold the eBook, but many experts in the field insist that if we had done that, sales would have been dismal compared to the downloads. So, in the end, we reached an immense audience of potentially millions of readers. That is a rich reward in itself. I hope Rich and Anke benefit from their participation in the project through sales of their artwork down the road. Imagine what the original versions of the Parma Endorion artwork could be worth in a few years."

# # #