Erik Hanberg’s visit

2019 marks the 10 th year of Erik Hanberg’s self-publishing venture online. Following his interpretation, this selling of e-books is a way of getting paid without trading time for money, as the income in years after a book is completed needs no time investment at all. The work is already done, and any sales in later years would only render the time previously spent on writing more and more prized. Now, Hanberg has authored more than ten books in e-book, paperback, or audiobook formats, and sold more than 52,000 copies, an accomplishment that an author can be proud of. . Surely, Hanberg’s success reflects a good blending of his writing interest and business sense. Yet, it is also a verification of the unlimited opportunities that the Internet can offer in accumulating capital and relation linkage. Hanberg’s entrepreneurial vision of the Internet is shown in two ways. First, he is able to take advantage on the early days of Kindle publishing. He gets a free ride, succeeds to self-publish his works at a low cost, and starts to collect readers. According to Hanberg, to go self-publishing is far more lucrative than utilizing services from a conventional publisher. An author can retain a larger portion, around 70%, of profit from sales through self-publishing. Moreover, the process of write and publish is a convenient takeaway for authors like him who write fast. Second and more importantly, Hanberg can make use of the Internet to get marketing benefits. He enrolls his book The Marinara Murders in Amazon’s KDP Select to offer the book free for 5 days. With a rise of free downloads, and the information revealed by the website EReaderNewsToday.com, Hanberg successfully uses the ranking algorithm of the website to place his novels at a higher popularity rank than works that affiliate with the major publisher Amazon. To me, Erik Hanberg’s success is definitely a tale of “Internet people” at the New Age of Virtual World.