In his new role, Gomez — who was the director of internet marketing at Holtzbrinck before he went to Penguin — will “work with the company’s team of accomplished editors to continue to grow the Byliner Writers Network,” according to the announcement. “He will be responsible for helping Byliner authors communicate more effectively with their readers and fans, and ensure that Byliner remains the premier source for the best stories by the best writers.”

Byliner, which was founded in 2011 by former Outside magazine editor John Tayman, publishes e-singles — works of fiction and nonfiction that are shorter than a full-length book but longer than a magazine article. (To see why I like this format, click here.) The site also hosts a large library of content published elsewhere and lets users follow their favorite writers. Byliner recently launched a subscription service for its e-singles, and it is publishing the New York Times’ ebooks.

“Our goal is to give readers the most satisfying, seamless way to discover and enjoy stories by the writers they love, and to provide Byliner writers with exceptional support and a platform that lets them grow and directly engage their fan bases,” Tayman said in a statement. “Jeff’s unique combination of publishing savvy, leadership ability, and writing background makes him a great fit for us.”

As Starkman notes in his column, the fact that longer stories have declined at newspapers like the L.A. Times shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: Tribune Co., the owner of the Times, filed for bankruptcy several years ago and the chain has been struggling ever since (the Los Angeles paper and many of the company’s other assets are said to be for sale). The Washington Post, where CJR says longform stories were down by about 50 percent from 2003, and the New York Times — down by 25 percent, according to Starkman — have also been suffering from an industry-wide dropoff in ad revenue.

More resources on fewer stories isn’t necessarily bad

In that context, publishing fewer long stories seems like a fairly natural response to a shortage of income, and a need to print fewer pages on expensive newsprint. It’s also worth noting that the cash-strapped New York Times has actually published more stories that are 3,000 words and longer than it did in 2003 — 32 percent more, according to the CJR’s numbers. And the newspaper got some well-deserved acclaim for the way it handled the online version of one of those stories: namely, the Snowfall feature it released as an online series and an e-book late last year.

The Times‘ Snowfall feature helps to make one point that Starkman’s bleak assessment of the industry avoids, and that is the fact that longform journalism is evolving away from the traditional newspaper-based publishing that his numbers focus on. As the spokesman for the L.A. Times noted in a response to CJR, much of the paper’s feature coverage now includes video, graphics and other elements that wouldn’t have been present a decade ago — and don’t show up in a raw word count.

“In recent years, our longform storytelling has also typically incorporated unique videos and photo galleries. The two media – print and pixels – are seamlessly integrated in a way that a Factiva search can’t capture.”

As journalism professor Jeff Jarvis pointed out in a response to Starkman’s original post on Twitter, simple length is not a determinant of overall quality in newspaper features (and to be fair, the CJR writer admits as much in the first few paragraphs of his piece). In many cases, those longer features that were published a decade ago may have been overly generous — or indulged in only because they make good “award bait,” as one former newspaper colleague of mine described them.

Papers aren’t the only source of longform journalism

If newspapers like the Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal are being more judicious with their use of space, and trying to devote the time and resources to fewer long pieces that provide more value, that’s arguably a good thing. And Starkman’s diagnosis also focuses (not surprisingly perhaps) on newspapers in a vacuum — essentially ignoring all of the innovation that is occurring in longform journalism outside that industry, through services like Byliner, Longreads and Atavist.

The magazine-style features that Byliner has become known for, or the longform pieces that readers share through Longreads may not replace the missing newspaper features one-for-one, but they are clearly filling a need. That need also becomes obvious when you look at some of the most-saved articles at “read it later” services like Pocket — many of them are long features from magazines and other outlets (although whether those who save such pieces ever get around to reading them is another question).

In other words, newspapers are playing on a much broader field than they used to. And all that competition makes it even more important that they focus their time and energy on features that can really come alive online, the way Snowfall did for the NYT — and if that means fewer words in fewer pieces, then perhaps that is for the best.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jan Arief Purwanto, as well as the Columbia Journalism Review and Shutterstock / Ruggiero Scardigno

Internet curmudgeon Nick Carr attacked this particular question in a recent post on his blog, and got into an interesting debate with digital-media theorist Clay Shirky via the comments. Ironically, while Shirky is often criticized as a purveyor of wishful thinking about media, it is Carr who argues there is something ineffable and mysterious about the format we know as the book, while Shirky’s argument seems more based in reality

(Note: we are going to be discussing the future of the book and potential business models for book-related content at our paidContent media conference in New York on April 18, with a panel discussion featuring Atavist founder Evan Ratliff and Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks).

In his original essay — entitled “Will Gutenberg laugh last?” — Carr notes that research shows e-book reading is still on the rise, but also shows that print reading continues to command a large share of the market, and that printed book sales are “holding up relatively well.” Some publishers and distributors have even noticed a slowdown in e-book sales, says Carr, who then goes on to propose some reasons why that might be the case, including:

“We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction)… the e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been.”

Shirky says even e-books themselves are transitional

Among those who showed up to comment on Carr’s piece was Shirky, who argues that it is more likely the book format itself is simply going to die out as a result of the web and other developments — and not just the printed book, but the whole concept of a book, which he describes as nothing more than a “production unit” for content, like the album was for music.

As Shirky puts it:

“Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.”

In a comment of his own, Carr responds that whatever might happen to reference works like encyclopedias or phone books — which he agrees would make more sense in digital form — books that consist of an “extended narrative, either fictional or factual and almost always shaped by a single authorial consciousness and expressed in a single authorial voice” would always remain, even if it is in digital form, because there is more to it than just being a convenient container for content.

“Your desire to see cultural artifacts as mere technological artifacts, as “production units,” leads you to jump to the conclusion that because the narrative art of the book is resistant to digital re-formation, the narrative art is doomed to obsolescence.”

In a follow-up comment, Shirky maintains that the novel — fictional or not — is a content model that is “pretty decisively wrapped up in the affordances and limitations of print,” from their length to the idea that all of the content has to be delivered at the same time and for a single price. He argues that given the “native grain of the internet,” those features would not be transferrable to an online environment in the long term. In other words, e-books themselves might be just an interim step towards something else.

“If I’m right about this, the fate of the printed book will have less to do with competition from ebooks (at least in their ‘digital copy of print’ versions) than from competition with Longreads and New Inquiry for the time and attention of the reader of extended narratives.”

Will books follow the epic poem into oblivion?

This doesn’t sit well with Carr, however, who responds with a comment that (among other things) accuses Shirky of having an almost nihilistic approach to cultural artefacts like books, and of failing to see that in some cases having a new product or platform replace an old one might be a loss for humanity rather than a gain:

“I’m certainly not suggesting that uniquely valuable forms of media, or the modes of thinking or expression that they promote, are immune to destruction or alteration by historical forces, particularly ones driven by utilitarian concerns. But if such a medium is lost or diminished by technological or economic change, we shouldn’t simply say ‘who cares; other shit will come along.’”

In a response to an email from Wired magazine founder and author Kevin Kelly on the subject, Carr gives some examples of valuable forms of media that he believes have been lost or diminished: namely, “the oral epic poem, the symphony, the silent film with live musician accompaniment, the dramatic play, the short-form cartoon, the map [and] the LP.” And he argues that the book, the movie and the video game could also fall into this category.

In the end, Carr’s argument comes down to a belief that old forms of expression like the traditional book are better than anything that might have come along to displace them from their position of dominance in our culture — and his belief forms part of the argument in his book The Shallows, which argues that digital media is actually changing the way we think, and in general making us more stupid (a view I have argued against).

Are we seeing the rise of new artistic forms that will be as beneficial to humanity as the epic poem was, or the symphony, or the silent film? I think we are, and Clay Shirky seems to as well, but Carr clearly disagrees. Who is right won’t be known for some time, if ever.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, retro writer and Frederic della Faile

For BuzzFeed, best know for viral fluff like “50 photos of cat heaven,” the new story is its most ambitious plunge yet into the rarified world of New Yorker or Atlantic-style essays. At a deeper level, BuzzFeed’s initiatives will test whether digital upstarts can replace the literary pleasure and cultural power of established print titles.

Turning to the story itself, ”Atari Teenage Riot: The inside story of Pong and the video game industry’s big bang” is a spry, deeply researched account of how a group of maverick computer types installed Pong games in TV sets and placed them in bars around San Francisco. The gaming pioneers earned millions in quarters and gave video games a permanent place in America’s cultural landscape.

The story is a good read but is more remarkable for the way it’s presented: in white on black letters and with vibrant pictures and animation that conjure up the era of Pong. It looks like this (in the story, the image is animated):

The Pong tale is not the site’s first long-form story, but it is the deepest that BuzzFeed has reached into its technical bag of tricks. The result is a new and distinct form of storytelling that strives to offer up the same depth and beauty of print magazines. It’s unclear, though, if BuzzFeed can also match the output of those publications.

“We are not a ‘GIF of the day’ or ‘one longform story per week’ kind of place, so it’s impossible to really set expectations on quantity here. We’re very much focused on the quality,” said Executive Editor Doree Shafrir, a former Rolling Stone editor who is one of several high profile hires BuzzFeed brought in this year.

Despite the lofty goals, there are still two wild cards here. One is whether BuzzFeed (or anyone else) can duplicate the aesthetic escapism of a print magazine; the Pong story, which I read on both a tablet and computer, was smart and the layout was beautiful, but it didn’t feel as relaxing as reading the New Yorker on the couch.

Second, there is the business question. It’s terrific news that BuzzFeed’s ambitions stretch beyond cats and OMG, but can they pay for them? After all, the state of online advertising means BuzzFeed can’t (for now, at least) fund its essays with high-priced Tiffany’s or Cartier spreads. At the same time, the site may be hard-pressed to apply its “native advertising” approach to long-form stories.

In the bigger picture, BuzzFeed is one of several disruptive publishers helping to define what long form will look like in the digital age. Others include The Verge and Gawker which are likewise offering free, quality essays. Meanwhile, platforms like Byliner and Atavist are providing new ways for authors to charge for long-form content. For now, it’s too soon to say if these companies will come to displace the New Yorker as a new form of magazine — or if, instead, there will be room for all to flourish.

(Image by alphaspirit via Shutterstock)

What’s new this time around is that Amazon is using a pay-once model: A user who buys the first installment in a serial automatically gets all of the others for free. Serials are being run out of Amazon’s West Coast publishing division – along with its imprints like Thomas & Mercer and 47North – while Kindle Singles are based on the East Coast.

Amazon has eight Kindle Serials for sale so far. In some cases, it’s tapping authors who’ve previously published books with Amazon Publishing. (“I got the gig because Thomas & Mercer picked my previous novel, Jewball, off the KDP self-publishing pile, and we all got along,” Neal Pollack, the author of a Kindle Serial called “Downward-Facing Death,” wrote in the book’s online forum.) Three are from a startup called Plympton. The company was cofounded by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love. For the three titles, Amazon paid Plympton up front for a licensing deal that includes digital, print and audio world rights for a limited time.

Prior to the Amazon deal, Plympton had planned to pay its authors $500 an episode plus a bonus, but that changed with the deal — which was lucrative enough, Lee says, the company is “profitable, for now,” and will be able to pay those authors five-figure fees. There’s also a revenue split on serials sold. Amazon pays Plympton royalties directly, and Plympton then splits them with the author.

Kindle Singles and Kindle Direct Publishing offer authors a 70-30 royalty split in most cases. When I asked Jeff Belle, VP of Amazon Publishing, whether the split is the same for Kindle Serials, he didn’t give me a direct answer. “We are offering compelling terms, which will vary based on the proposed work,” he said.

“The third-episode problem”

Claudia Hall Christian is the author of “Denver Cereal,” a long-running online serial that is published daily in 500-word segments and gets 50,000 readers a month. Christian, who has been writing “Denver Cereal” for four years, is a bit skeptical of Kindle Serials. “I think it’s a marketing and advertising strategy,” she said. “Can the authors they’ve chosen actually write serial fiction? The problem with writing serial fiction is that it’s hard.” She hopes that Amazon will tap authors who’ve been writing in the format for a long time.

Plympton’s Goldstein Love echoed Christian’s comments that writing serials is hard. “We have really come across a lot of what we’re calling the third episode problem,” she told me. “It’s a lot easier to write a brilliant first episode of something. In your second episode, you’re continuing that. In the third episode, you realize you have no idea where this is going. It’s a real danger with writing serially. We won’t sign anyone on fully until we see how the first three [episodes] go.”

Amazon exclusives?

Amazon talked with Byliner about including its titles in the Kindle Serials launch. Byliner “had no problem with the pay-once model,” the company’s editor-in-chief Mark Bryant told me, but didn’t want to accept Amazon’s exclusivity requirement. Byliner authors “want their work to be available everywhere, in all the digital bookstores and on every device,” Bryant said. (Many Byliner e-singles are also available as Kindle Singles, but they’re not exclusive to Amazon.) Byliner will still sell individual installments of its serials in the broader Kindle store. Installments are $2.99 apiece.

Going forward, Lee isn’t sure whether Plympton and Amazon will make another deal. “We do not know what we are going to do going forward,” she told me. “But [Amazon] really cares about this format.” All eight Kindle Serials are offered at an “introductory” price of $1.99, which will rise over time, though Amazon’s Belle wouldn’t tell me by how much the increase will be. “It’s still early and we have a lot to learn,” he said. “But what we can say is that we think Serials will always be a great value for readers and a great opportunity for authors.”

Ultimately, writing a serial is a lot of work and takes more time than writing an e-single. “Downward-Facing Death” author Pollack explained a little more about the editorial process in a post for the Huffington Post:

Here’s what [my editor at Amazon] laid out: A book published in installments of 10 to 15 thousand words, over the course of a few months, with each segment ending in a moment of suspense or uncertainty. Each segment would be copy-edited, and edited for content if necessary. Then, when the whole thing was done, the book would get another complete edit, and would be issued in a full Kindle edition as well as a paperback one. The whole process would take about six months.

Further, each Kindle Serial is a flat price – with multiple episodes priced about the same as just one Kindle Single, for now. It seems that Amazon will have to invest more money in this format than it has in Kindle Singles: It has to pay authors more because they are writing more, and it either has to sell the Serials at a significantly higher price accordingly or take a loss. Since it doesn’t appear to be offering the 70/30 revenue split that it does on Kindle Singles and KDP titles, it might also have to pay authors more money up front. So Kindle Serials could be a bigger investment for Amazon than Singles have been.

Jeff Belle doesn’t doubt the pay-once strategy. “We thought this would be the best customer experience for reading a digital serial,” he told me. “in the end, if you focus on the best possible customer experience, the revenue will follow.”

This week’s featured title

The book: “The Marriage Bargain” by Jennifer Probst (Entangled, $2.99). “The Marriage Bargain” is #11 on the New York Times e-book bestseller list this week, and #20 on the USA today list.

Copies of “The Marriage Bargain” sold: 152,668

What it’s about: A bookstore owner casts a love spell to save her home. When a billionaire offers her a marriage in name only, she accepts, but neither bargained for love.

How it hit the bestseller list: Probst, the author of several erotic and contemporary romance titles, built up her presence on social media months before the book was published in February. She did a 20-stop blog tour in early 2012 to promote the book. Entangled bought a Goodreads ad and “steady positive reviews began to trickle in from various outlets.”

A sequel, “The Marriage Trap,” comes out in June, with a third book in the series, “The Marriage Mistake,” due in the fall.

“The Marriage Bargain” on … Amazon |Barnes & Noble | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 5/13/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/3/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

“After Friday Night Lights” is regularly priced at $2.99, but when it was selected as a Starbucks Pick of the Week, customers could grab a card with a redeemable iTunes code from Starbucks stores, making the book free.

At that point, the New York Times reports:

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

Byliner elaborated to me:

Our core belief is that great writing has value. So when Amazon chose to set the price of Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights to $0.00 in response to a Starbucks and Apple promotion, we removed Buzz’s story from Amazon for the week of the promotion. We did so because we felt that a price of zero was disrespectful to Buzz and antithetical to what we’re about. On May 1, After Friday Night Lights will again be available at Amazon, priced at $2.99–the same price it carries at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other digital stores.

According to the NYT article, when Byliner told Amazon about the Starbucks promotion, Amazon warned Byliner that this “might” happen. And what do you know — it did.

Amazon gave me the following statement:

We always try to provide the lowest price possible for customers, and we don’t believe we should make our customers pay for an e-book they can get for free elsewhere due to a pricing promotion. Our customers are huge fans of Buzz Bissinger’s work, and we hope and expect that Byliner will enable us to sell “After Friday Night Lights” again on May 1.

And yes, it has long been Amazon’s policy to match e-book prices on other sites. The company has done so in error before, but this time it wasn’t a mistake.

Presumably Amazon will do the same thing the next time an e-book is chosen as a Starbucks Pick of the Week. (It’s not an e-book every week, but it is sometimes. Random House’s “The Night Circus” was chosen last September, and I don’t think that Amazon dropped the price to $0 then, but it seems clear that that’s the new policy.)

This means authors will have to make the decision: Will they gain more new readers and sales by having their book promoted in Starbucks (for which they are also paid a royalty on each copy downloaded) — or will the sales lost through Amazon that week outweigh any Starbucks benefit? Correction: Starbucks tells me: “We do not compensate authors or other Content Providers for downloads, as content providers willingly waive royalties for the marketing exposure they receive through the Pick of the Week program.”

And publishers will have to decide whether, like Byliner, they then pull the $0 book from Amazon…or wait it out and hope the week’s over soon.

This week’s featured title

“A Night to Remember” by Walter Lord (Open Road Media, list price $14.99). “A Night to Remember,” first published in print in 1955, its the New York Times nonfiction e-book bestseller list at #1 this week. (Another Titanic-related title, Byliner’s “Lifeboat No. 8” by Elizabeth Kaye, is at #2 on the nonfiction e-book list. It’s $1.99.)

The book tells the story of the fateful last hours on the Titanic, and Open Road timed its release around the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. “A Night to Remember” was the Kindle Daily Deal on April 13. The company started promoting the book about a month in advance of its publication with a Twitter campaign. Open Road sent promoted tweets with hashtags like #titanicheroes, did-you-know facts about the ship’s sinking. “Those sometimes linked back to the book but it was mostly just a hashtag,” says Open Road chief marketing officer Rachel Chou. The company also ran display ads through the Google Display Network and an ad through A&E on the History Channel’s Titanic website.

Most e-book retailers did roundups of Titanic books, Chou said. Nook and Apple included “A Night to Remember” in the Titanic roundups on their sites and Amazon included it in a Titanic e-mail sent to customers.

Price as of this writing on… Amazon: $8.54 | Apple: $9.99 | Barnes & Noble: $10.99 | Google: $8.54 | Kobo: $10.09 | Sony: $11.99

New York Times bestseller list, week of 4/29/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list. A * denotes that a title sold enough copies in digital format to make it to the “Combined Print & E-Book Best Sellers” list, and the # that follows the * denotes the position of the title on the combined list. Prices are e-book list price and do not take any retailer discounts into account. An [AP] denotes that agency pricing is currently in effect. I also mentioned whether Amazon offered a book as a Kindle Daily Deal in the past two weeks (thanks to the reader who suggested that).

fiction

2. ”Fifty Shades Darker,” E.L. James (Random House/Vintage)*(#2) $9.99 [AP]
3. ”Fifty Shades Freed,” E.L. James (Random House/Vintage)*(#4) $9.99 [AP]
7.  ”On the Island,” Tracey Garvis-Graves (self-published, Kindle only)*(#7) $2.99 [AP]
8. ”The Marriage Bargain,” Jennifer Probst (self-published)*(#10) $2.99 [AP]
9. “Tiger,” Laurann Dohner (Ellora’s Cave) $8.75
11. ”A Matter of Honor,” Jeffrey Archer (Macmillan/St. Martin’s)* $2.99 [AP]
21. “A Song of Ice and Fire” (4-volume series), George R.R. Martin (Random House) $29.99 [AP]
25. “Victims,” Jonathan Kellerman (Random House) $13.99 [AP]
29. “Rock Paper Tiger,” Lisa Brackmann (Soho Press) $14  Kindle Daily Deal 4/9/12
33. “Beautiful Disaster,” Jamie McGuire (self-published) $2.99 [AP]
34. “I’ve Got Your Number,” Sophie Kinsella (Random House) $12.99 [AP]

nonfiction

1. “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord (Open Road)*(#1) $14.99. Kindle Daily Deal 4/13/12
2. “Lifeboat No. 8,” Elizabeth Kaye (Byliner)*(#1o) $1.99 
23. “Auschwitz,” Miklos Nyiszli (Skyhorse) $2.99
24. “In the Garden of Beasts,” Erik Larson (Random House/Crown) $12.99 [AP]
30. “A Stolen Life,” Jaycee Dugard (Simon & Schuster) $11.99 [AP]
31. “Unorthodox,” Deborah Feldman (Simon & Schuster) $10.99 [AP]
32. “Why Me?” Sarah Burleton (self-published) $2.99 [AP]
35. “Outlaw Platoon,” Sean Parnell (HarperCollins) $12.99 [AP]

USA Today bestseller list, week of 4/19/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-30 where e-books outsold print, including their position on the list. Prices are e-book list price and do not take any retailer discounts into account. An [AP] denotes that agency pricing is currently in effect.

4. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” E.L. James (Random House/Vintage) $9.99 [AP]
5. “The Lucky One,” Nicholas Sparks (Hachette/Grand Central) $7.99 [AP]
6. “Calico Joe,” John Grisham (Random House/Doubleday) $12.99 [AP]
7. “Fifty Shades Darker,” E.L. James (Random House/Vintage) $9.99 [AP]
8. “Fifty Shades Freed,” E.L. James (Random House/Vintage) $9.99 [AP]
9. “The Hunger Games Trilogy,” Suzanne Collins (Scholastic) (three titles bundled together) $53.97
10. “Guilty Wives,” James Patterson (Hachette/Little, Brown) $12.99 [AP]
12. “A Game of Thrones,” George R.R. Martin (Random House/Bantam) $8.99 [AP]
13. “On the Island,” Tracey Garvis-Graves (self-published, Kindle only) $2.99 [AP]
16. “A Night to Remember,” Walter Lord (Open Road) $14.99
17. “The Marriage Bargain,” Jennifer Probst (self-published) $2.99 [AP]
18. “Come Home,” Lisa Scottoline (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) $12.99 [AP]
21. “Tiger,” Laurann Dohner (Ellora’s Cave) $8.75
25. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Stieg Larsson (Random House/Vintage) $9.99 [AP]
26. “Stay Close,” Harlan Coben (Penguin/Dutton) $12.99 [AP]
27. “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” Stieg Larsson (Random House/Vintage) $9.99 [AP]
28. “Defending Jacob,” William Landay (Random House/Delacorte) $12.99 [AP]
29. “A Matter of Honor,” Jeffrey Archer (Macmillan/St. Martin’s) $2.99 [AP]

“Titanic Disaster” is from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Russell W. Knight Department of Maritime Art and History.

The full issue, “Writing the Book,” is available as a free PDF here. The entire thing is worth a read but the highlights for me were about the e-singles published as original works through The Atavist and Byliner. Many publishers are experimenting with e-singles, but we haven’t seen many statistics about how well they sell up to this point, so it’s great to see some early data and lessons emerging.

Byliner’s Tayman writes about the company’s initial efforts with John Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit,” and success since then:

As our website’s initial offering, his e-book was made available free of charge during the first 72 hours when some 70,000 readers downloaded the PDF version. When his e-book went on sale in Amazon’s Kindle Singles store-neither Apple’s Quick Reads nor Barnes & Noble’s shorts digital storefront were open yet-it quickly became the top selling e-book; it has sold steadily ever since at $2.99. In subsequent months, Byliner has sold more 100,000 e-books, including those written by bestselling authors such as Ann Patchett, Mark Bittman, and William T. Vollmann.

*Note: Byliner has published 15 Byliner Originals and the sales are across those titles.

In another piece, journalist and Wired contributing editor David Wolman writes about publishing “The Instigators,” his 10,500-word piece on the Egyptian Revolution, through longform journalism publisher The Atavist. He’s excited about the future of longform storytelling, and also writes about some of this type of e-singles publishing:

What hasn’t been so sunny? For one thing, I don’t know what to call it. Among e-book enthusiasts “single” (or Kindle Single) is shorthand for a work that is generally too long to be a magazine feature but too short to be a book. For much of the world, though, the lingo of “singles,” “e-books” and “e-readers” still causes confusion, akin to talking about CDs in 1985. (A few months ago, I tried referring to “The Instigators” as a “mega-feature,” but that’s clunky and makes me sound like an appliance salesman.)

It has also 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. Since publication, I’ve written the following far too many times: “You don’t need a tablet computer or Kindle to read it. Just download the (free) Kindle-for- Mac or Kindle-for-PC software, install it-it takes all of 80 seconds-and then you’re off!”

I’ve been happy with sales, which continue steadily, but make no mistake: There is no zippy sports car in my future. And it’s difficult to determine what marketing strategies helped, hurt or were just a waste of time. For example, we sold an excerpt to TheAtlantic.com. It’s impossible to know if that translated into a substantial number of sales or whether people who read the teaser found it to be a sufficient dose of inside information about Egypt’s revolution, and decided against coughing up the $2 or $3 for the whole piece. Still, the attention this new marketplace is getting keeps me optimistic. As of late November, ‘The Instigators’ was still a top rated Kindle Single, which should keep the sales coming. I hope.

Nieman Reports

“Rules for Virgins,” the “startlingly sensual tale of an aging master courtesan instructing her beautiful young protégé in the ways of love and business in 1912 Shanghai,” is $2.99 as a Kindle Single and in Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iBookstore and Google’s eBookstore. It will be released December 5.

Byliner’s fiction editors are Walter Kirn, Esquire’s former literary editor Will Blythe and Playboy’s former literary editor Amy Grace Loyd. They plan to release two pieces of original fiction each month.

Byliner is also adding a fiction archive, which should match the size of the 60,000 nonfiction stories already in the Byliner.com database, up from about 25,000 at launch. The site only sells its original works. It links to the original sources of everything else in its archives.