I was listening to an interview this morning on RDU with a new author called Rachel King who has written a book called the Sound of Butterfly Wings. She mentioned that in New Zealand – a country of around four million people – you have to sell five thousand copies of a book in order for it to be classified as a best seller.

Five thousand.

That’s using the traditional methods of using a publisher and distributing via retail outlets. What would happen if she changed the model?

How many books would be downloaded if she wrote it online, gave away some teaser chapters free and blogged about it? How viral would it become? What would it take to change the model and exceed five thousand sales? There’s an increasing number of very successful musicians which launched via MySpace and completely ignored the old industrial-powerhouse-centralised business model.

There’s a challenge here, and I’m going to rise to it. If I write a book – admittedly not a novel – and place it online – how many will get downloaded?

Watch this space. I’m sharpening my pencil. Or should that be “cleaning my keyboard”?