Byliner Plus

The San Francisco-based Byliner publishes fiction and nonfiction e-singles it calls “Byliner Originals,” from authors like Margaret Atwood, Amy Tan and Jon Krakauer. It sells them through ebook retailers like Kindle, Nook and Apple, usually for $1.99 or $2.99. Now Byliner is testing a program called Byliner Plus, which offers unlimited access to Byliner Originals (39 of them and growing) as well as exclusive stories from authors like Susan Orlean and Sebastian Junger (often those that were previously published but have not been available online) for a monthly fee. Right now, an introductory offer allows a generous 60-day free trial, after which the subscription is $7.99 a month.

Byliner CEO John Tayman stressed to me that the program is experimental. “For some time now readers have been asking if they can just subscribe and receive each new Original automatically, and we wanted to accommodate that request,” he said. But the final price of a monthly subscription hasn’t been settled yet: While I received the $7.99 offer in an email and it is apparently available through December 3, another page on Byliner’s site says a subscription is $12.99 a month. “Nothing has been settled as of yet,” Tayman said. “We’re testing a variety of things during this period, including feature sets and price points, to see what resonates best with readers and provides them with the best value and experience.”

If you sign up for Byliner Plus, the stories can’t be downloaded to an e-reader. Rather, they’re available through a responsive-design HTML5 site and can be read on computers, tablets and smartphones. Users can also save the stories for offline reading.

Tayman explained how authors are paid: “We’re sharing subscription revenue with authors based on the amount of their work read within the subscription service, on a pro-rata basis. We’ll also be paying authors (and distribution partners) affiliate fees for new subscribers they direct to Byliner.”

Atavist

The Brooklyn-based Atavist publishes original e-singles and also sells a digital reading software platform. (In addition, the company is working with Barry Diller and Scott Rudin to launch a digital publisher called Brightline.) Atavist has published 18 e-singles so far, most for $2.99, and already sells them through its iOS app (as well as through various digital bookstores). Now readers can also sign up for in-app subscriptions: to start, three months for $6.99. Nieman Journalism Lab reports, “Authors will still get a cut, even if subscribers aren’t paying for a specific story; at the end of each month, subscription money will be divvied up based on the number of downloads for each individual author.”

Alderman is Atwood’s “protégé” through watchmaker Rolex’s mentor program. The women wrote alternating chapters of the zombie serial via email. While the entire serial is already written, Wattpad says Atwood and Alderman may change it based on online requests and reader feedback. (Similarly, Amazon is eliciting reader feedback on its Kindle Serials.)

The main difference between Wattpad’s serial and Kindle Serials is the price: Wattpad’s is free, Kindle Serials are $1.99 (for now; the price is supposed to rise). The Kindle Serials program, while new, is also more fully fledged and Amazon is conceiving of it as some kind of money maker, while Wattpad’s approach seems purely experimental and designed to drive user engagement. Clarification: Wattpad asked me to note that many of the works on its platform are published a chapter at a time, so all those could technically be considered serials (though many serial fiction authors argue that it’s the form’s editorial characteristics, not just publishing in chunks, that defines the genre).

“This format offers a cool insight into the writing process and touch points for readers to participate directly with writers,” said Wattpad CEO Allen Lau. “The wall between readers and writers is falling.”

Margaret Atwood doesn’t really need to find new ways to get attention: after all, the 72-year-old Canadian-born author and poet has already won a slew of awards, and is seen by many as a candidate for a Nobel Prize. Most authors her age would be resting on their laurels somewhere, but Atwood seems to have an unquenchable curiosity about new things, including Twitter. Now, she is working with the online writing community Wattpad to try and encourage new writers, and is also involved in a crowfunded effort to create a service called Fanado that authors can use to connect with their readers. Other authors may want to slow down, but Atwood seems to have no interest in joining them.

Wattpad is a Toronto, Ontario-based startup we’ve written about before that recently raised $17 million from a group of venture backers including Khosla Ventures and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. An online writing community that writers can get involved with either through the web or via mobile apps, Wattpad has more than 3 million users and over 5 million pieces of content uploaded to the network. And as Khosla Ventures partner Andrew Chung pointed out after the firm financed the company, the kind of interactive model that Wattpad is based on is very different from more traditional self-publishing services, which is one of the things that attracted Atwood about it.

Wattpad allows young writers to experiment

Instead of just uploading books, many members of Wattpad’s community upload unfinished chapters that are still in development, or pieces of poetry they need feedback on, and then get comments and advice from other users of the service — both other writers and readers. In a piece she wrote for the Guardian recently, Atwood talked about how that process could help young writers experiment and develop their own voices, giving them tools that writers of her generation never had at their disposal:

No one need know how old you are, what your social background is, or where you live. Your readers can be anywhere. And if you’re worried about adverse reactions from your teachers, your grandmother, or others who might not like you writing about slavering zombies or your relatives, you can use a pseudonym… [and] not only that, you’ll have readers who leave encouraging comments on your message board, thus boosting your morale.

In the past, Atwood says, writers like her had to scribble in notebooks or journals, experiment with poems in high-school yearbooks and keep their most heartfelt writing “in our sock drawers” for fear of ridicule. As they grew older, they helped to create literary magazines and journals that were chronically underfunded and handed out in coffee houses and other locations after Poetry Night or other open readings. The feedback that Wattpad writers can get, she says, is not only invaluable but actually recreates the kind of process that writers like Charles Dickens got when they serialized their work in magazines.

Atwood also notes that networks and communities like Wattpad aren’t necessarily a replacement for the traditional publishing industry, but more like an enhancement or addition to it. Some members of the Wattpad community have already gotten interest from mainstream publishers based on the response and the following they’ve gotten from other members of the service (in addition to becoming a member of Wattpad and posting poems of her own, Atwood has agreed to judge a Wattpad poetry contest). As she describes it:

Publishers bring a lot to the joint venture that is producing a book. Not everyone wants to read those kinds of books, and not everyone wants to write them – but they remain a huge aspiration for many. For those who want to hone their writing skills, schools and tools are increasingly available. In my view, Wattpad is not a replacement for publishers, but a gateway leading to them.

Atwood is also helping to create an interactive artists’ platform

In addition to her work with Wattpad, Atwood is one of the founding artists involved with a startup called Fanado, which is trying to raise funds through the crowdfunding service Indiegogo in order to launch a kind of digital-community platform for artists. The campaign, which closes at the end of July, has already raised $53,000 towards its goal of $85,000 and offers a number of perks — including the chance to become a character in a new Atwood novel, which comes with a donation of $10,000 or more (one fan has already claimed that perk, but two more are still open).

The idea behind Fanado is to give authors tools that they can use to interact with fans remotely, including the ability to share live video and audio of readings or get-togethers with a community, and to sign and distribute both electronic books and printed books, as well as CDs and other offerings related to a work. In some ways, Fanado is the logical extension of an earlier project that Atwood was involved in, which led to the development of an electronic book-signing device called the “Long Pen” — which authors could use to sign physical books in remote locations while on a virtual book tour.

But my favorite part of Atwood’s piece defending her experiment with Wattpad is when she talks about how people seem to see these projects as undignified in some way, as though they are beneath someone of her advanced age and/or standing in the literary community. As she puts it in the Guardian post:

Once again people are giving me strange looks… “But Margaret,” you can hear them whispering. “You’re a literary icon at the height of your powers; it says so on your book covers. Why are you sneaking out with an online story-sharing site heavy on romance, vampires and werewolves? You should be endorsing Literature, capital L. Get back up on that pedestal! Strike a serious pose! Turn to stone!

At her age, the literary legend argues, “you can afford to be undignified; you’re free to explore, and to guinea-pig yourself, and to stretch the boundaries.” Not only is that what Atwood wants to do, in multiple ways, but her support of Wattpad seems to stem from the belief that young writers need somewhere to do that as well, and that writing as a whole is better off for it — and that’s a pretty inspiring message.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Peter A. Wolf