Why 2012 was the year of the e-single

paidcontent reporting:

E-singles — stories somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words, usually nonfiction, and sold as inexpensive ebooks — are the format for our time. Here’s why.

photo: Flickr / B_Zedan

In January 2012, Evan Ratliff, the CEO of Brooklyn publishing platform Atavist, semi-jokingly described e-singles as “[replicating] journalism’s extraordinary challenges in an entirely new place.” A little under a year later, publishers of all types are looking to e-singles to give them a boost in a digital era...
This weekend I sat on my in-laws’ living room couch and read “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” a longform story in the New York Times , on my iPad. “Snow Fall” marks the launch of a new publishing effort at the Times. The paper is partnering with Byliner, the e-singles startup run by former magazine folk and based in San Francisco, to publish around a dozen e-singles in 2013. (Working definition of e-single: A story somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000 words — shorter than most books, longer than most magazine articles — usually nonfiction, and sold as an inexpensive ebook.) Byliner is selling an expanded version of “Snow Fall,” for $2.99, at digital bookstores....
Amazon’s U.S. Kindle Singles store now contains 283 singles. In February, I reported that the company had sold two million Kindle Singles; as of September, that number was up to 3.5 million, and Amazon just expanded the program to the U.K., where it will include new entries by bestselling British authors as well as most of the American Kindle Singles. Many Byliner Originals are available through Kindle Singles, and they’ll be crossing the Atlantic for the first time with the program’s U.K. expansion.
How are e-singles actually selling? Several of them hit the New York Times ebook bestseller list this year. A few of Amazon’s Kindle Singles authors have done quite well. That’s a lot for an individual, but not so much for a company. E-singles are cheap, a couple bucks a pop, so they are not likely to drive major revenue for publishers: With most Kindle Singles priced at $1.99, that’s only $7 million or so — and Amazon only takes 30 percent of it, making the revenue basically a rounding error....
http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/24/why-2012-was-the-year-of-the-e-single/