January 2011 - offers 283 singles. Paid Content reported in February 2012 that Amazon had sold two million Kindle Singles; by September, sales had grown to 3.5 million. Amazon has since expanded the Singles programme to the UK.
And that’s just Kindle. Apple and Barnes
& Noble also have e-singles stores to sell content to owners of their ereaders.
E-singles are filling a niche abandoned by most magazines: long-form journalism and storytelling. The consumer’s appetite for such content, and their willingness to pay for it, was still a big question just two years ago. But the success of long-form pioneers The Atavist and Byliner proved there was a market, especially for inexpensive repurposed or bundled content. Byliner reported an estimate of more than 1 million e-singles sold in 2012 while Atavist sold more than 100,000 of their 20 Originals.
Depending on your academic, career,
culinary, political, historic, educational or sexual needs and interests, you can find an ebook or e-single that satisfies those needs.
Let’s take the opposite ends of the spectrum: Cosmopolitan’s ebook Sex Questions Answered in 20 Words or Less” and The Atlantic’s ebook The Civil War. The former is penned by Cosmo’s infamous, if anonymous, sex advisors, the latter by authors including Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott.
E-singles are filling a niche abandoned by most maga- zines: long-form journalism and storytelling
Cosmo’s ebook is a condensed compilation
of their sex advisors’ best (or at least most libidinous) work that has appeared in the magazine edited down to 20 words per answer. The ebook was promoted as “a titillating collection of sexual trivia, how-to’s, and tips for success as only the editors of Cosmopolitan could provide.”
All snickering aside, Cosmopolitan sold thousands of copies of Sex Questions. Before that, the company cashed in on another e-single, Cosmo’s Sexiest Stories Ever, published in August 2011 that sold more than 40,000 copies at US$1.99 initially later reduced to US$.99.
“In the beginning, we thought there wasn’t
enough content to charge $1.99,” Cosmo editor-at-large John Searles told PaidContent, but the price increase didn’t hurt sales.
The e-singles don’t exist in a vacuum. Cosmo promotes them in the print magazine which results in an immediate and traceable increase in sales of the e-singles.
And the titillating titles also stimulate
the sales of more e-singles. Searles also said Cosmo experienced a “substantial number of sales” of the Sexiest Stories e-single when Sex Questions was released.