eral hundred dollars (U.S.) up front for typesetting. You don't collect royalties until your book has sold enough copies to cover its costs. That may be years, if ever. However, such publishers also offer online courses, chats with published authors, and other attractions. For many aspiring writers, this is invaluable training and well worth the investment. If you just want to reach other people, you can publish yourself on your own website. Once you've registered your site at Yahoo ries, or collected essays. But know the limits of the medium. Computers make us hungry for jolts - emotional rewards in the form of sounds, graphics, and surand other search engines, you may attract readers to your novel, verse, short sto- Writers and the Web l i t e r a r y | by C r a w f o r d Kilian prising information. The low resolution of the computer monitor slows down our reading speed by up to 25 percent, so we're bored by great masses of text on the screen. So if you create your own site, you owe it to your readers to make it welcoming. Text should run only halfway across the screen, just as a newspaper story runs in a compact column. Paragraphs should be single-spaced, with gaps between them. The typeface should be serif (such as New Times Roman) instead of sans serif (such as Helvetica) because serif text is easier to read. Unless a graphic is essential to the text, it shouldn't be there at all. The background colour should be white or a pale blue, green, or yellow to set off black text. With growing computer power, ever-increasing bandwidth, and improved monitor resolution, many writers will find it easier to typeset their own books and put them up on the web either free or at very low cost. If they want to get rich, they'll be disappointed. But if writers want to reach small, offbeat readerships that don't interest commercial publishers, the web will give them a reach around the world. Crawford Kilian is the author of Writing for the Web: Geeks' Edition (SelfCounsel Press, 2000). He's the author of twenty books and over 600 articles, and teaches Communications at Capilano College. His e-mail address is ckilian@thehub.capcollege.bc.ca; his personal website is http://www.capcollege.bc.ca/magic/cmns/crofpers.html Ten years ago, it didn't exist. Now it dominates the thinking of business, education, media, and government. The World Wide Web is also a remarkable opportunity for writers, though it's not likely to make money for them any more than it will for most of the dot.coms that start up and then burn out. The opportunities take several forms. Some people become "information architects" and "content developers," paid to write and organize information for government and corporate websites. At its crudest level, this means creating "shovelware," text written for print and simply dumped onto a site without concern for the demands of the online medium. More sophisticated sites provide printer-friendly archives designed to be read on paper, as well as chunked text in which every subject is broken into screen-sized bits no more than 100 words long. Some go into online journalism, or write for webzines. This can pay very well, until the money runs out. Salon Magazine, for example, is predicted by www.cfoivnside.com to expire on January 14, 2001. If so, its contributors will soon be sending query letters to good old print magazines. If they're smart, they won't e-mail those queries; so many hungry, lazy freelancers query by e-mail nowadays that many editors don't bother to read them. A snail-mail query letter shows you're serious. Others have discovered the e-book: electronic publishers who offer book-length manuscripts online. At www.iUn/Versexom, you can read hundreds of books for nothing...but very slowly. When you get impatient, you can order a custom-printed copy of the book - including seven of my out-of-print science-fiction novels. For unpublished writers, this is a kind of vanity publishing. You pay the e-publisher sev8 January | February