Amazon's imprint Singles is the focus of Laura Hazard Owen's Our Guide to E-Singles, July 29, 2011. Although mentioning some other short-form publishers, such as Atavist, she concentrates on the pioneering publishing venture by Amazon, started in January 2011. Owen points out a number of interesting features of Singles. It is open for submission to publishers (Hachette's short story by David Baldacci), agents (Jodi Picoult's three short contributions), and self-publishing authors. Singles has a submissions policy highlighting excellence, and seemingly an editorial apparatus, including an editor who makes comments, behind its selections. Attractively, Singles offers a very short window to publication for successful submissions. Owen calls singles, by which I assume she means what is variously called short form book publishing or long-form journalism, the hottest trend in publishing. She also speculates that it could be disruptive for the industry.
If by disruptive she means crossing traditional boundaries and showcasing a new hybrid publishing model that combines elements of traditional and non-traditional publishing, then I definitely agree with her. Singles offers a publication platform that can be used by anyone for submissions, including publishers, established authors, agents, and self-publishers, reminding me of Lulu's move to position itself as an open publishing platform. While we don't know the reality behind the stance of selectivity, their stated submissions policy and their editorial apparatus seem to place them between self-publishing and mainstream selectivity.
In the heterogeneous, hyper-abundant online book marketplace of today, Singles is a way of segmenting and branding a particular type of ebook, countering, in a somewhat oblique way, the problem of Spamazon by saying basically, "here's our good stuff."
Sending the authors, after they have been accepted, to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) uses the very simple automated publishing mechanism of KDP. And use of KDP continues the boundary-busting combination of price and royalties that has attracted many authors, established and self-published, to ebooks.
By courting a wide variety of submissions and adding trappings of selectivity in an automated publishing environment with an author-friendly royalty arrangement and a reader-friendly pricing arrangement, Singles is crossing all sorts of traditional boundaries with seeming success. And all that is in addition to the innovative encouragement of short-form “books,” which might well be one of the major contributions of ebooks to both writing and reading.
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