Inside the industry, you hear a lot of talk about multimedia publishing, but you don’t necessarily see a lot of activity—it’s still considered a risky and unproven business.
However, the New York Times has rounded up some worthy contenders now (or soon to be) on the market, including a new novel from Wally Lamb. However, Lamb didn’t partner with his publisher; instead, he and an old friend collaborated on the project and will release the book-app as part of a new epublishing startup called Metabook.
Also, the team that brought you The Silent History, Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn of Sudden Oak, have come out with a new ten-day book-and-app novel, The Pickle Index. Carmen Maria Machado of NPR reviews it here. Quinn told #FutureChat on December 11 that the project “was probably the most difficult app I’ve ever built.” It took three years to build the iPhone edition, and an Android edition is too expensive to commission at this point. In response to Greko, who questioned the writing quality, Quinn said that his and Horowitz’s intent is to always have writing that’s fully as strong as the tech and design.
In the serialization space, there’s an upcoming contender, The Pigeonhole, a publishing startup focused on a global audience for fiction and nonfiction. They launched a year ago with a novel, and are now focused on a Letters series (Letters from Greece, Letters from Berlin, etc).
However, in breaking news Wednesday morning, it was announced that multimedia publishing’s darling, Atavist, has laid off half its staff. Once upon a time, Atavist was riding high on a partnership (which has since dissolved) with Scott Rudin and Barry Diller to publish multimedia ebooks. In fall of last year, when their book-publishing arm shuttered, a spokesperson told Publishers Lunch, “We have identified that the market for highly innovative enhanced full-length literary ebooks still heavily relies on a print component and has yet to emerge.”
Bottom line: In many cases, multimedia and app-based publishing projects emerge from small studios and startups, rather than inside the Big Five. But if you look closely enough, you’ll find some experiments at traditional houses, too. As mentioned briefly in our last issue, Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books continues to experiment in the book-app digital realm with adult fiction. The new, slickly developed Crave app made by Paragraph Studios launched on December 2 with Colleen Hoover’s new novel. It’s also worth taking a look at the genre-bending novel Arcadia by Iain Pears, released as both a hardcover and an app. The app—produced by Faber & Faber and Touchpress—has outsold the hardcover edition.
Still, though, even the best-performing efforts (such as The Atavist, which won a National Magazine Award this year) have trouble with long-term sustainability.
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.
