Amazon Publishing—the company’s trade publishing arm, not the self-publishing platform—is creating a new imprint called Amazon Original Stories.
The imprint is described as publishing “short fiction and nonfiction works that can be read in a single sitting.” The effort sounds incredibly similar to a program introduced in 2005 called Amazon Shorts, which included fiction, nonfiction, and sometimes excerpts of upcoming books by well-known writers. As the Kindle gained traction, Amazon Shorts gave way to Kindle Singles, which was introduced in 2011 to focus on pieces of nonfiction, journalism, and fiction of around 5,000 to 30,000 words.
Just to keep things confusing, the Kindle Singles store will be selling works published under Original Stories. Two titles open the imprint: Joyce Carol Oates’s The Sign of the Beast, and Crown Heights by Colin Warner, Carl King, and Holly Lorincz.
Julia Sommerfeld is editorial director for the new imprint and entered Amazon Publishing by way of its product and innovation team in 2015. Her previous work was handling digital content strategy for TODAY.com and NBCNews.com.
Bottom line: Free to Prime and Kindle Unlimited members, the Amazon Original Stories imprint sounds not only like Amazon Shorts and Kindle Singles but also like Amazon’s current imprint StoryFront, which focuses on short fiction. We asked Amazon whether StoryFront is a forerunner of Amazon Original Stories. An Amazon spokesperson confirms this, saying, “Previously, short fiction was published under the StoryFront imprint. … Amazon Original Stories is dedicated to publishing short fiction and nonfiction. The fiction published under the StoryFront imprint remains available in the Kindle Singles store.” Amazon Publishing’s imprints page will be updated shortly. Meanwhile, we’re glad to see good efforts in shorter work, but it might help if Amazon rethought some of its branding. The list of these short-form developments is now long-form.
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.
