Remember the Humble Indie Bundle, the Humble Indie Bundle 2, and various successors? They applied the pay-what-you-want model to selling sets of popular independently-developed computer games, and have reportedly made a lot of money for the developers, as well as for the charities that they also support.
Now a new site, StoryBundle.com, has sprung up that promises to do for e-books what the Humble Bundle does for games: select a few quality independent e-books and allow people to set their own price for the DRM-free bundle. It still seems to be in the planning stages—the site is taking the email addresses of interested parties but does not yet have any bundles on offer.
It will be interesting to see how well it does. One of the secrets behind the Humble Bundle’s success is that many of the titles it offered had already made reputations of their own, and gamers saw this as a chance to snag these popular titles cheaply. Will the Story Bundle offer titles with similar reputations? Are there any independent titles with similar reputations?
I also wonder whether the Story Bundle will do the same as the Humble Bundle and pick a charity or two with which to split the take—I suspect that’s another part of the appeal in that it allows people to feel good about donating to help a charity they support at the same time they support the creators of the works they buy.
At any rate, I’ve signed up for the bundle’s email list and will post again when they announce their first bundle. I wonder what it will include?
(Found via GalleyCat.)
It’s very early in the game but if you know where to look there’s something big brewing. I predict that indie titles might change the game in “literary” fiction, and maybe sooner than we think.
Yes, very interested in this and what indie titles it will include. The time seems about right for a major, major author to be discovered and found through the Kindle. Keep looking through that literary fiction on there and I think we’ll see…