There were 689 passengers and 178 crew members on board.
The weather was stormy, with winds as high as 55 m.p.h. and high waves.
The ferry capsized in the Baltic Sea about 50 miles off the southwest coast of Finland.
Five other ferries and five helicopters were participating in the rescue operation. High seas hampered rescue efforts.
About a dozen passengers from the ferry were picked up from the water and taken aboard another ferry.
No information about casualties was available yet, and it was unclear what had caused the accident.
King is well-known in the United States and abroad for his horror novels. He was the subject of many news stories several years ago after he was seriously injured in an accident. He was struck by a minivan while he was walking on a road near his home in Maine.
The online novel is called "The Plant." It is about a predatory vine that terrorizes employees at a publishing house.
King released six chapters online under an honor system. He asked readers to voluntarily pay $1 for each chapter they downloaded. He said he would continue to write the novel if 75 percent of the people who downloaded each chapter paid for it.
"If you pay, the story rolls. If you don't, the story folds," the author wrote on his Web site.
Yesterday, King announced that he would suspend work on "The Plant," and turn his attention to other books.
King's assistant, Dale Jons, said that the author stopped work on "The Plant" because the number of copies downloaded had dropped from 120,000 a week to 40,000 a week. The assistant said the percentage of readers paying for the downloads had dropped from more than 75 percent to 46 percent.
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