AN E-SINGLE A new market segment is fast emerging for long- narrative storytelling which millions are willing to pay for in electronic format. But what works and why?
f 2012 was the year of anything, it was the year of the e-single and ebooks.
Whenever publishing
companies as diverse as Playboy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Good Housekeeping,
The Economist, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, Esquire, Seventeen, and The Atlantic all do the exact same thing at the exact same time and they do it in something of a hurry, it’s a safe bet that it’s a big deal.
And that’s exactly
what happened in 2012: All of those magazine publishing companies and many others started producing e-singles or ebooks using, in most cases, content they had already published in print or online.
Those efforts were
part of the force that has driven the creation and sales of e-singles (pieces between 5,000 and 30,000 words, or 15-90 pages) to ever increasing levels. Amazon’s US Kindle Singles store alone launched in