All About E-Singles
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This document discusses e-singles, which are short digital works between 5,000-30,000 words published as standalone ebooks. E-singles are released by traditional publishers, magazines, startups, and Amazon. They cover fiction and nonfiction topics and are sold on ebook stores, standalone websites, and apps. While e-singles allow maintaining reader interest and monetizing short works, challenges include consumer confusion over pricing and finding an audience for every title. Overall, e-singles are doing well, with Kindle Singles selling over 2 million copies, though growth may depend on improved discoverability.
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All About E-Singles
- 2. “Curling Up” Illustration by Debbie Ohi
- 3. Long reads
- 5. Who Is Releasing Them? Lots of different types of publishers…
- 9. Startups…
- 13. And Amazon!
- 14. They Can Be About Anything. • Fiction • Nonfiction – longform journalism • Nonfiction – memoir and personal essays • Nonfiction – useful/practical
- 15. Where Does The Content Come From? • Original • Repurposed content from a newspaper or magazine
- 16. Where Are They Sold? • Separate sections of an e-bookstore • Floating around in the general e-bookstore (not so great…stay tuned) • Standalone websites and author websites • Apps
- 17. Kindle Singles • Largest: Launched in January 2011, now up to 193 titles, about three new ones added per week • Over 2 million sold • Submissions process, vetted by editor • For originals: Editing, cover design, jacket copy • Extra promotion and marketing
- 19. Apple’s “Quick Reads” in the iTunes Store
- 20. Nook Snaps
- 21. Kobo Short Reads
- 22. Apps
- 23. What do they cost? A Breakdown of Kindle Singles prices… $2.99 $0.99 $1.99
- 24. Business Models – Standalone business/startup – Additional revenue stream within larger company – Partnerships – Why Barnes & Noble, Apple and Kobo are different…
- 25. Standalone Business/Startup • The Atavist • Byliner Originals • Now and Then Reader
- 29. Additional revenue stream within larger company • Most newspaper/magazine models • Book publishers – Penguin Shorts – Rodale Essentials • Kindle Singles
- 30. Partnerships • Hachette + Bloomberg Businessweek • Random House + Politico.com • Random House + RealClearPolitics • Penguin + The Economist • Open Road + ProPublica
- 31. Why Are Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo different?
- 32. Nook Snaps
- 33. What are the advantages? • Maintain reader interest between book releases • Give people more of a topic or author they love: “Length is not a driving factor for people who are buying these” – Penguin’s Carrie Swetonic • Content that writers simply could not sell before • Repackage content for new revenue streams, cheaply • Monetize instead of just giving it away free
- 34. Maintain reader interest between book releases. Give readers more of a topic/author they love. Drive pre-orders for the next book.
- 35. “Length is not a driving factor for people who are buying these.” --Penguin’s Associate Director of Marketing, Carrie Swetonic
- 36. Sampling…upsell! $35 $0.99
- 37. Repackage content to create new revenue streams – cheaply. Monetize content that might have been free before.
- 38. A home for content that authors simply couldn’t sell before…usually because it was too long for most magazines but too short to be a full- length book.
- 39. And what are the risks? “If publishers think this is just a way of getting anything out there, as opposed to something that’s been edited and watered and fed and cared for, we risk screwing up the genre on the front end” – Random House Executive Editor Jon Meacham
- 40. “Fill a genuine gap in the market” --Penguin’s Associate Director of Marketing, Carrie Swetonic
- 41. “It has been a bit of a challenge to make more people aware of the story’s existence. It’s not on any real-world bookshelves, and Atavist doesn’t have an army of publicists working on my behalf. Even people who want to read it sometimes need guidance on how to get it.” --David Wolman, author of “The Instigators”
- 42. Low cost means you have to sell a lot of them to make a significant amount of money (2 million sold sounds good, but…)
- 43. Possible consumer confusion about what they are $0.99? Separate sections of the store are key
- 44. Despite fast publishing process, picking a topic that is relevant… Especially when readers are accustomed to getting the content for free.
- 45. So how are they doing? • Kindle Singles • Byliner • Atavist • Magazines • Traditional publishers
- 46. What’s Next?
- 48. Apps
- 51. Other retailers get involved
- 53. Questions?
- 54. Thanks! • Laura Hazard Owen • laura@paidcontent.org • Twitter: @laurahazardowen
Editor's Notes
- What are e-singles? They are snack-sized e-books. You’ll sometimes also hear them referred to as “digital shorts,” or just as e-books, but they are longer than the typical magazine article, definitely longer than a blog post, and they’re shorter than a full-length book. They can be anywhere from 5,000 words to 30,000 words, and they are generally sold at low prices, under $5 and usually under $3.
- I’m not sure how clear this picture is,but it shows a guy lying on his couch under a blanket with his iPad. And I’m sure we’ve all done something like this, if not with an iPad then with our e-reader, and the point is that people like doing this with their gadgets.A lot of companies right now are targeting people who like to do this. That’s why we’ve seen sites Longreads and Longform.org become more popular. I don’t know if you’ve heard of these sites, but they curate longer articles from around the web. This content is for people who are tired of reading short blog posts and little SEO-grabbing snippets online and they want something a little longer and meatier, and instead of reading it at their desk at work they are going to load it on their device and read it after work, or on their commute to and from work.“Longreads,” Longform.org, Instapaper, Read It Later, “curling up,”Byliner’s big journalism archiveAs a publisher
- A number of sites have emerged online that aim to curate the longer content available. Here’s one of those sites, Longform. As you can see, the editors find these longer articles online, provide a short description of what each of them is about, and on the left side there, you see that you can save each article to an app so that you can read it on your e-reader or your iPad later.Another site, Longreads, also tells you how many minutes it will take to read a piece.
- One of these sites that lets people save things to read later is called Read It Later, and and as you can see, more and more people are doing this. They go online, they find something substantial to read and they save it and they come back to it.So what does this have to do with e-singles? Well, to me it’s a sign that readers like this middle ground between a short blog post that they probably won’t remember reading in 24 hours, and a full-length book. I think these works in digital form that are at least a few thousand words long are really ideal for this “curling up” phenomenon that we see a lot more people doing. And it doesn’t have to be on your couch. It might be on your half-hour commute home from work, or on your lunch break, and it’s a time when people want to read something that just seems a little more substantial than standing there sort of tapping around on their phone, but it’s also not a gigantic time commitment.
- So we have our working definition of what e-singles are, which is a piece of content that is generally between 5,000 and 30,000 words, and we know why people want to read them, because they provide a gratifying reading experience that doesn’t take a lot of time but is more fulfilling than just sitting there clicking away on the computer. Now let’s talk about who is releasing singles, and you will see that it’s a very wide range of companies.
- First of all, traditional book publishers are releasing e-singles. Here you see two kinds – there’s Simon & Schuster’s “Mile 81” by Stephen King on the left, and King released that standalone short story as a way to promote his upcoming book, 11/22/63, although the content of the books was actually not similar. The stories weren’t related, it was just sort of a little appetizer, and it included an excerpt from 11/22/63.On the right is a Runner’s World Essential Guide from Rodale. That pulls together a bunch of different content from Runner’s World magazine and packages it into an e-single. Both of these are $2.99.
- Many newspapers and magazines are taking content that they previously ran and stringing it together or enhancing or beefing it up in some way and selling it. Some examples of newspapers that are doing this to some extent are the Los Angeles Times, Guardian, National Post, Washington Post, and Boston Globe, as well as magazines like Cosmopolitan, GQ, Time and Fortune Magazine.
- Here’s “A Nightmare Made Real,” the LA Times’ first e-single. This is by Christopher Goffard, an LA Times Staff writer. In A Nightmare Made Real, je expanded on a story that he’d published earlier in the year. The story was about a Las Vegas banker accused of the kidnapping, sexual assault and torture of his child’s mother. The e-book includes new material, “including more detailed portraits of the investigating detective and the defense team, and a deeper look at the alleged “suicide note” that emerged at a pivotal moment in the case. In addition, Goffard provides an account of how the story started with an unlikely tip and grew into a narrative.”The LA Times followed this up with a completely different type of book, a cookie cookbook for Christmas, and they plan to do more of them.
- Here’s Byliner. Byliner was launched in May 2011 and has two components – an archive of journalism online and then these Byliner Originals by authors like Buzz Bissinger, Margaret Atwood, Jon Krakauer and Ann Patchett. They’ve released 25 Byliner Originals so far.I’m just going to call out Byliner’s branding here. I think it’s really good. You see these, and you know what they are, the yellow banner, the really good photography, they are covers designed for the web. Just wanted to point that out bcause I think they do a great job with it.
- The Atavist, a startup from two former editors at Wired magazine. They’ve released 16 e-singles so far and they focus on narrative nonfiction.
- Now and Then is a newer startup, launched this past December, and it focuses on serious nonfiction with historical underpinnings.
- Amazon’s Kindle Singles launched in January 2011 and Amazon was really the creator of this format. Their description of Kindle Singles is “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” Amazon is signing original authors and also selling e-singles from all of the sources that I previously mentioned. Amazon now has 193 Kindle Singles, and they are signing up about three news ones a week. I will talk more about Kindle Singles in a sec.
- I think you’ve seen from the previous slides that e-singles can really be about anything. They are mostly falling into these four categories so far. Fiction – short stories, nonfiction – longform journalism, the kind of thing that might appear in a general-interest magazine like the New Yorker, or as a longer series in a newspaper; nonfiction – more personal stuff like humor and memoir and essays, and then something we’re seeing a bit of is nonfiction, focused on topics like cooking.
- Again we saw that generally if you’re talking about a book publisher or a startup like Byliner, or Kindle Singles, they are focused on original content, content that was not previously published somewhere else. And magaines and newspapers are more likely to bundle together content that they previously published and then maybe enhance it in some way.
- Separate sections of an e-bookstore, we’ll get to that in a sec. Or floating around in a general e-bookstore, which as I’ll talk about later, is not such a great idea. They’re often marketed on the source’s website, whether it’s the publisher or Byliner or whatever, and then there are links to the e-bookstore. And then we’re starting to see a couple of examples of these being sold through publisher apps, which I’ll go back to at the end of the presentation. But let’s talk about what is the largest storefront for these so far, and that is…
- You have to submit your work for inclusion in this program; you can’t just go online and be like well I’m going to upload this to Kindle Singles. Everything submitted gets vetted by an editor, and if it’s accepted, it’s included in the Kindle Singles section of the site. That’s really important because the works there get a lot of extra promotion by Amazon. That means they’re included in e-mail newsletters, or as Kindle Daily Deals, and all of them are featured prominently on Amazon’s site.
- You have to submit your work for inclusion in this program; you can’t just go online and be like well I’m going to upload this to Kindle Singles. Everything submitted gets vetted by an editor, and if it’s accepted, it’s included in the Kindle Singles section of the site. That’s really important because the works there get a lot of extra promotion by Amazon. That means they’re included in e-mail newsletters, or as Kindle Daily Deals, and all of them are featured prominently on Amazon’s site.
- Here’s Apple’s Quick Reads, which is Apple’s answer to Kindle Singles. Apple’s not signing up any original authors the way Amazon is, but it has built this separate section of iTunes. All the works there are under $5, and I’m hearing a lot of publishers say that they are seeing an increasing number of their sales of e-singles coming from Apple.
- Here’s poor old Barnes & Noble’s Nook Snaps, which is really not as developed as Kindle Singles, as you can see. This section is pretty hard to find on Barnes & Noble’s site, but it is there.
- And Kobo has Kobo Short Reads.
- And here is The Atavist’s iOS app, where users can buy e-singles directly through the app.
- As I said, they’re almost always under $3 and we’re seeing a lot of them priced at $1.99. I recently broke down the Kindle Singles by price, and you see that the bulk are at $1.99 and then there’s about a quarter at $0.99 and around 16 percent at $2.99. So $2.99 is on the more expensive side for these.
- What are the business models for this?
- Startups
- I should note that the Atavist is a company with a dual revenue stream. The Atavist licenses its content management platform and Evan Ratliff recently said that the Atavist’s revenue from licensing is like five to six times higher than editorial revenue. So we may see that these sites also need to be able to do something else, to have some other product, in order to be able to really thrive. And The Atavist just announced a new $1.5 million funding round, so it seems as if investors like that sort of dual revenue stream.
- This is what we see within most newspapers and magazines and at book publishers, and it’s also how Amazon’s business model for Kindle Singles works. Smaller part of a larger company.
- Lots of book publishers, in addition to maybe signing up some e-singles on their own, are working with media partners. A lot of the times the partner will provide the content and the writers, and then they do marketing together. That can be a good way to share the risk and you also have a built-in audience from the publication that you’re partnering with, and it can increase the prominence and discoverability for both parties.
- These are different because they’re not signing up original authors (yet), they are just storefronts. Again, I’m just hearing anecdotally that publishers are seeing the highest sales through the Kindle Singles, they’re seeing some significant sales through the Apple Store and Nook is basically a non-player at this point.
- Now these are going to depend based on the genre that you’re publishing in, but in the example of fiction, it’s a great way to maintain reader interest between book releases and get them excited for the next one. For example, Lee Child’s “Second Son” served as a standalone prequel to Lee Child’s Reacher novels and it also included an excerpt of his upcoming book.
- Here’s something funny, I do think it’s important to make it clear that these are not full-length books, so readers know what they’re getting, but they are not necessarily saying “Oh, I want to read something short.” That’s why Amazon is smart to say that Kindle Singles are “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length,” readers get that, and they are looking for a story to be told in a way that makes sense.
- Hearst has released several Good Housekeeping “Mini Cookbooks,” and the editor of that program called them “an onramp to graduating people” to higher-priced content, whether print or digital.
- This is just not that expensive an endeavor. If you already have this content in digital format, it doesn’t cost a lot more to compile it into a separate little e-book. And maybe you were giving that content away before. You might have an author who writes a short story and you give it away to their fans. Well, now you can sell it.
- Now this tends to be on the journalism/nonfiction side, but I’ve talked to authors who said that they had this idea for a long piece but it was simply too long for a traditional magazine now. It’s very rare for a magazine like the New Yorker to run a piece that is more than 10,000 words long, and they also don’t want to puff it up to be a full book length. But on an e-reader, who cares how long it is, if the story’s told well. It lets authors escape a traditional print format. And I should say something here that this is really a digital format. I think it’s very unlikely that we will be seeing print versions of these in stores. I don’t think readers want to buy a little print copy of a single short title. This is a format made for digital.
- It’s kind of tempting to be like, hey, I’m just going to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks. But here, Random House Executive Editor Jon Meacham, who is working with Politico on a series of e-singles about the 2012 presidential campaign, is warning against that. These are definitely a fairly low-risk way to experiment with digital content, but it’s not a dump for stuff you can’t sell.
- Discoverability is a challenge! David Wolman is a journalist who wrote “The Instigators” for The Atavist and it became an e-single. It was 10,500 words long.
- Possible consumer confusion about what they are (as many full-length e-books are also priced at $0.99)Despite the fast publishing process, picking a topic that is relevantReaders accustomed to getting the content for free
- Possible consumer confusion about what they are (as many full-length e-books are also priced at $0.99).Amazon customer reviews, “This book was really short! What a ripoff!” Well, if it’s --make a note on the cover, or somewhereYou don’t customers to go on these sites and rank a book as one star because they think it’s too expensive.
- Readers are accustomed to getting this type of content for free since you can go online and read some magazine stuff, and in the past authors might have made some of these stories available for free. So again it’s not really about throwing stuff out there so much as looking at what readers are demanding and what makes sense for the format and what’s worth paying for.
- Amazon said in March that it has sold over 2 million Kindle Singles.Byliner told me it expects to sell over 1 million this year, and the only statistic The Atavist has released is that they’ve sold over 100,000 last year and they hope to double that this year.Traditional publishers who are releasing shorter works by big-name authors are doing really well with these. Stephen King’s “Mile 81”, for $2.99, sold over 300,000 copies across platforms, and Random House tells me that Dean Koontz’s “Moonlight Mind” and Lee Child’s “Second Son” sold hundreds of thousands of copies each.In the past couple months, several e-singles have hit the New York Times e-book bestseller list. Karin Slaughter’s “Snatched” is on there now at number 8 on the fiction list. Byliner’s Lifeboat No. 8 has been on the nonfiction list for several weeks now. A lot of the time, these hit the list, at least at first, because of an Amazon promotion. For example, Lifeboat No. 8 was a Kindle Single and it was featured in Titanic promotions that Amazon ran. So attention from Amazon – which it’s shown it’s invested in the format – can really be huge for these, although it’s not the only reason that they hit the NYT bestseller list. When a work resonates with a lot of people and it’s at a low price point and it’s by an author they like, it can get onto the bestseller list like any full-length book.
- Tablets – color, enhancements, more special additions so works have music or video and they’re not just straight text. Although I’d say watch out for the enhanced e-book trap…readers may not want to pay more for these things. Right now the Atavist charges $1 more for the enhanced e-singles through its app. The price may be something that you want to play around with.
- The Atavist sells enhanced e-singles through its app. They’re $2.99 compared to the straight text-and-art versions on the Atavist’s website for $1.99. Byliner doesn’t have an app yet but I would not be surprised to see one some time not too long from now.
- The anthology comes back? (Maybe) People are interested in TOPIC. Could a publisher technically bundle a bunch of these and sell them as a print book or as an e-book? It’s possible, but I think getting too focused on that kind of takes away from the true benefits of this format which is that it’s digital and fast. So the end goal here is not to figure out, how can I eventually create full-length books out of these, but to truly think of it as a format that is sort of native to digital and that has the added benefit of not really cannibalizing other sales but creating new ones.
- This might make a little more sense. A lot of publishers are thinking about subscriptions now, and if you can let readers sign up and receive one of these a month or something like that, that’s a great way to experiment with subscriptions and possibly layer what you learn onto projects in the future where you might be making full-length e-books available through subscription.And likely we’re going to see experimentation with this coming from the startups like The Atavist and Byliner. The Atavist has said it’s going to start offering subscriptions in the next couple of months.
- The question is will Barnes & Noble and Apple and Kobo start doing what Kindle Singles has done and sign up original authors, and that’s a possibility, although those companies don’t seem nearly as interested in original publishing as Amazon does. So we’ll see. But as this format grows, I’d really hope to see the standalone sections of e-bookstores for singles stand out more, make it more clear that they’re there and what they’re selling.
- What’s next?If you are watching this presentation and you’re a publisher who’s not sure you fit into any of the categories, I’d really recommend you take a look at your content and kind of think outside the box about what might work. How-To?Graphic Novels?Kids? Scholastic did this promotion over Christmas break last year where they released a new 39 Clues e-single every day for a week, so kids could read them and look forward to them while they are on vacation. A lot of kids don’t have their own e-readers, which I think is partly why we’re not seeing a ton of publication of e-singles in that area yet, but it makes sense to me to release short stories for kids.