By TERESA McUSIC
of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

   Access to the Information Superhighway could mean more than the exchange of ideas among its 30 million personal computer travelers.  It could mean big bucks.
   That's the idea behind a new book written by two renegade immigration lawyers who recently took a profitable trip on the great connector of computers around the world.  In just three months, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel said they added more than 1,000 clients and made $100,000 in fees from a single advertisement on this computer highway.
   But the trip was hardly a smooth one.  Their short advertisement/electronic mail sent overnight to users hooked up to the superhighway caused an avalanche of negative responses from purists on the network.  The critics claimed such use of the network was unethical, if not sacrilegious.  The couple received everything from death threats to "mail bombs," which clogged up their computer, along with legitimate inquiries and new clients.
   The lawyers know they did nothing illegal.  history will cast them as either marketing pioneers or snake oil sellers.
   In the meantime, they're now out to show the rest of us how to do it.  Their book is called "How to make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-line Services" (Harper Collins publishers, 234 pages, $20).
   The concept is surprisingly simple, despite the high-tech methods employed.  Basically, the lawyers show you what computer hardware and software to purchase, how to get connected to the superhighway with your commercial message and then how to respond to the tidal wave of inquiries (and their nasty counterparts, or in computerese, "flames").
   Virtually anything can be sold on this computer link-up, they claim.  Florists, ticket scalpers, eye makeup video producers, classroom grade tutors and self-published authors all have made money on "the Net," computerese for Internet, the main artery of the superhighway.
   Canter and Siegel see selling on the superhighway as the next natural evolution in American marketing.
   "The Information Superhighway is going to affect your life, whether you want it to or not," they write.  "In the very near future you will talk to your friends and family, send letters, go shopping, get news, find answers to your questions, draw pictures, solve problems, even gamble, and more, all on the Information Superhighway.  Not least, you can make a lot of money."
   The couple coined the term "cyberselling" to identify their marketing via computer.  They take it from the futuristic novelist William Gibson, who created the term Cyberspace in his science fiction book "Neuromancer."  Cyberspace describes all the electronic information paths and messages being sent on the superhighway.
   Now the lawyers have a consulting company, Cybersell, that teaches people how to sell their products, catalogs, expertise and ideas on Internet.
   "Commercial use of the Internet was a natural," they write.  "It required no special, sophisticated skills and the cost was very low."
   Canter and Siegel even provide a cost comparison with other forms of advertising media.  A one-column inch advertisement in the New York Times that runs once, for example, costs $440 to reach a potential 1.1 million people.  Leasing a 56-K line, Internet access and computer rental runs $1,000 per month to reach a potential 30 million people.
   But the best part to cyberselling, the authors claim, is something no other advertising medium can do at this point: interact.
   "For marketing [interactive] means that instead of simply sitting in front of a television or reading a magazine, quietly watching an advertisement pass before your eyes, you can, in some way, communicate back to the seller your level of interest, questions, or desire to purchase," Canter and Siegel write.
   That interactive ability may build customer/seller relationships more powerful than any marketer could dream of, the authors write.