As regular Hot Sheet readers know, we’ve followed the trend toward short reads and serialization represented by companies such as Tapas (which we’ve covered here and here), Serial Box, Rooster, and Amazon Singles (covered here).
For the most part, mobile delivery is the animator in these efforts. The idea is that consumers will pay for short-read segments delivered to their phones, whether those short reads are existing material, originally created work, or a mix of both. Subway commutes are inevitably mentioned as the perfect setting for such formats.
Now, there’s news of Radish, which characterizes itself as “a short-form serialized fiction platform capitalizing on the shift to mobile.” Radish is a year old this month and says it has had “hundreds of thousands of app downloads” since launching in Feb. 2016. Recent coverage of Radish at Publishers Weekly shows that Radish:
- features original content
- recruits writers from Wattpad and Amazon KDP (but has no official relationships to those companies)
- currently reports having some 700 writers and 300,000 consumers
- has focused mostly on romance for female teens, but says it’s expanding to include more SF and fantasy
- partners on original content from Serial Box
- uses micropayments made by Radish “coins,” which readers can use to open a new chapter without waiting for its normal delivery time
- claims to be paying one author $13,000 monthly and says others are making “several thousand dollars” monthly
The reason we’re hearing about Radish now is that it has announced $3 million in seed funding from high-profile backers, among them author Amy Tan; Beverly Hills’ United Talent Agency; Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, a venture capital arm of the German corporation that owns Penguin Random House; Charlie Songhurst, a former corporate strategy chief with Microsoft; and ITV chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette. One of its advisors is Larry Kirshbaum, formerly of the Time Warner Book Group and Amazon Publishing in New York. And Ankur Jain, a Tinder executive, is joining the board.
If you’re interested in writing at Radish, visit the site to apply. A writer’s work is evaluated through the site’s application form, and then the Radish staff invites participation if they like the content a writer provides. The site advises that it may take from two weeks to a month for writers to receive a response.
Bottom line: We welcome platforms—such as Radish and Wattpad—that provide revenue directly to writers. And the micropayments approach is one that Radish’s founding CEO Seung Yoon Lee knows well: he’s also behind Byline, a crowdfunding journalism site in beta since its 2014 creation. What remains to be seen is how much appetite there is for pay-as-you-go short reads. After all, you can buy an entire ebook, keep it on your smartphone, and read it in short bursts or binge read the whole thing. Time will tell how deep an audience there is for the daily ping of a 15-minute read arriving on the phone.
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.
