From the press release:
Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century—works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated—whether it’s a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.
Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today’s announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.
Or they could have called them “novellas”, which is a long-accepted term. But I suppose they’re also thinking about non-fiction works. And putting the Kindle brand name on everything e-bookish in sight.
Congratulations to Amazon for finally catching on to what Smashwords has been doing all along. But I have no doubt that Amazon will get the credit for this amazing innovation.
Well, there is the matter of visibility.
As we’ve seen with full-size books, the Kindle draws more traffic than everybody else combined and *sells* more ebooks than the rest of the industry.
Put that visibility to the service of short-form content and we just might see a revival in shorter content forms, both fiction and non-fiction. At a minimum this should be a great outlet for backlist short stories, Novellas, and Novelettes.
It’s not as if there’s much life in magazines or anthologies to start with so it’s hard to gripe about anybody trying to offer outlets for short content.
Depending on pricing it looks like an exciting new platform for the Short Story. May bring a revival to that form.
Publishers want customers to buy books, not read books. Reading books actually slows sales. Shorter content will help.
I would have published this work in that way had I only seen it coming!