About five years ago, there was incredible enthusiasm among progressive publishers about the potential for “singles” publishing. Singles are short reads between 5,000 and 30,000 words—often too long for an article, but too short for a book. The startup Byliner, founded in 2011, was the leading publisher of singles at the time, something of a media darling that received a range of breathless writeups. Unfortunately, Byliner never found a sustainable business model and was eventually bought by and folded into the digital publishing service provider Pronoun (then known as Vook), which was recently acquired by Macmillan.
Another player in the market has been Amazon, which also made its debut in 2011 with Kindle Singles. Rather than stepping away from singles now that the market exuberance is gone, Amazon has doubled down on the program with Singles Classics. They describe the initiative as “a way to make iconic articles, stories, and essays from well-known authors writing for top magazines and periodicals available in digital form, many for the first time. Readers can now enjoy easy access to hard-to-find and long-lost articles and stories written by some of their favorite authors. Singles Classics are priced from $0.99 and available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.”
It sounds a lot like what Byliner was supposed to be, once upon a time; Amazon is offering this brand-new content through standalone purchase, as well as through Kindle Unlimited, where readers pay $9.99/month for unlimited ebook consumption. (Byliner used to have a subscription feature as well, for $5.99/month, but no longer.) If your work is accepted as an official Kindle Single, you’ll earn a 70 percent royalty even when the pricing is below $2.99.
Until this announcement, Kindle Singles has been a rather quiet publishing operation; the recent news has inspired us to revisit the history of Amazon writing and publishing initiatives:
- Kindle Serials. This was very active in 2012 and 2013, but Amazon hasn’t released a new serial since 2014. They are no longer open to submissions.
- Kindle Worlds. This program, which debuted in 2013, provides a way for fan-fiction authors to publish and profit from their creations—but only in cases in which Amazon has been able to secure a license for such activity. A portion of profits are shared with the original copyright holder. So far nearly twenty properties are licensed as part of Kindle Worlds.
- Kindle Scout. Launched in 2014, this is kind of like American Idol for unpublished books. An author can upload the beginning of a story, along with a cover, and try to gather as many reader votes as possible to catch the attention of Amazon staff and secure a boilerplate book contract with Amazon Publishing.
- Write On by Kindle. Also launched in 2014, this is more or less Amazon’s version of Wattpad (an online writing community). It’s unclear how many users the site has; no one has reported on this initiative since early 2015.
- Amazon Studios and Amazon Storywriter. Amazon Studios has been around since 2010 and produces original TV and film content for Amazon. It accepts scripts and video concepts directly from writers. If Amazon is interested in your work, they pay an option that matches or exceeds any applicable Writers Guild of America minimum. (It’s possible to reject their offer if you change your mind about working with Amazon.) In 2015, Amazon launched Storywriter to help people more easily write their scripts, since Amazon Studios mainly attracts newcomers and otherwise unestablished writers. Amazon Studios’ first production through this open-door process was Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, a series for children aged six through eleven.
- Day One. Amazon’s literary journal is produced every week (fifty-two issues a year), featuring short stories and poetry. It’s tied into Amazon’s short fiction imprint, StoryFront.
And we haven’t even mentioned all of the Amazon Publishing imprints—these are trade publishing operations, not self-publishing—such as AmazonCrossing, which is the largest publisher of translations now in the United States.
Bottom line: While singles publishing may now be a niche category, Amazon is best positioned to profit from them, despite the low price points, because Amazon sells direct to readers. It’s more difficult for traditional publishers to make these shorter works worth the trouble—especially since the business model for printing and distributing them to physical bookstores requires very high sales numbers to make sense. For example, James Patterson’s BookShots program features short reads of 150 pages that sell for $5 each, and the print runs for the first two books were 500,000 copies each. For more background on the Kindle Singles program, see Publishing Perspectives’ recent article.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
