That appears to be changing with Little, Brown U.K.’s launch of Blackfriars, a digital-only imprint that will focus on new literary fiction and serious nonfiction. The Bookseller reports that the imprint will publish nine to twelve titles a year, and they’ll be eligible for submission to major literary prizes like the Man Booker Prize. The Bookseller notes:

Digital titles are accepted by prizes including the Man Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, with the condition that they are published by “established” houses and made available for sale in print if the title is selected by the judges at the shortlisting or longlisting stage, respectively.

Blackfriars’ first titles will be published in June. Two of them were previously published in the US: The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan by Penguin’s Riverhead and Benjamin Anastas’s Too Good to be True: A Memoir by Amazon. According to The Bookseller, the “royalty rates on the titles are largely the same as those on standard combined print and e-deals.” Traditional publishers’ standard royalty on ebooks is 25 percent. (I’ve asked Blackfriars if it is paying advances, and what its ebooks will cost.)

Without the promise of higher royalties, digital-first imprints are not likely to be many authors’ first choice when they consider their publishing options — especially when it comes to literary fiction, which generally has not sold as well in digital formats as genre fiction has. But imprints like Blackfriars could provide a home for books that have had a little trouble taking off, and the books will get additional marketing support from Little, Brown.

Hachette’s Little, Brown in both the U.S. and UK and Hachette companies worldwide will publish Rowling’s yet-to-be-named-or-further-described book as both a print book and an e-book.

The Bookseller notes it’s “been rumored for sometime that Rowling was working on a crime novel set in Edinburgh,” but Hachette and Rowling haven’t released any more details on what the book will be about or when it will be published. No financial data about the deal, such as the size of Rowling’s advance if Little, Brown gave her one, is available.

Update: Rowling tweeted her book will be out later this year:

As you may have heard, I have a new book out later this year.Very different to Harry, although I’ve enjoyed writing it every bit as much.

— J K Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 24, 2012

The Blair Partnership, Rowling’s longtime literary agency, represented her in the deal.

The publisher for the Harry Potter print books is Bloomsbury in the UK and Scholastic in the U.S. Rowling retained the e-book rights for the Potter series and is selling the e-books and digital audiobooks herself at Pottermore.com. Pottermore was supposed to launch and start selling e-books last year, but it’s delayed and still in beta.

Well, price appears to be part of the answer. Little, Brown dropped the e-book price of The Black Echo, the first title in Michael Connelly’s long-running Harry Bosch series, to $0.99 from $7.99 at the end of June. Over the past month, the e-book has become a bestseller.

Dan Lubart, principal of iobyte and eBook Market View, took a look at The Black Echo‘s rise for us. Before the promotion began, it was at #487 on the Nook bestseller list. It gradually climbed up the charts, then jumped from #128 on the Nook list on July 18 to #3 on July 19. It’s now at #2 on the Nook bestseller list. The Black Echo started out ranked over 100 on the Kindle bestseller list (Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) only publishes its 100 bestselling Kindle titles) and is now at #2. The Black Echo is #13 on the Kobo bestseller list.

Little, Brown is a division of Hachette, one of the “big six” publishers that uses the agency model for e-books. The publishers set prices for e-books–which must be the same across all stores–and e-tailers get a cut. Agency publishers are just beginning to experiment with e-book sales–some participated in Amazon’s recent Big Deals promotion, for instance. The effect of a price drop on The Black Echo‘s sales rank should be good news for Hachette–and for other publishers of long-running series. They, like Hachette, can pull in new fans by putting the first book in a series on sale. Hopefully, readers will get hooked and buy the rest of the books in the series–that’s 16, in the case of Michael Connelly–at full price.

Check out our bestseller lists to find out the most popular digital content of the day from iTunes, YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Facebook, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Last.fm, Android, and Hulu.