With Kindle Singles, Amazon launches ebooks of shorter length

Today Amazon launched its Kindle Singles store, which consists of short fiction and nonfiction up to about 30,0000 words and priced between US $1-5. Most of the titles are previously unpublished, but there are a couple of long article/essay pieces that appeared previously in magazines, and three titles published under a new line of books being offered by the big-idea-generating TED group.

As you can guess by the name, Kindle Singles are only available for the Kindle platform, and they represent another step for Amazon into the world of publishing, and perhaps another missed opportunity for publishers.

One thing I find interesting is the pricing. It seems mostly reasonable — although $5 for a longform article is pushing it, everything at launch is $3 or less — but it also places Singles at the same price point as much longer independent novels for sale on the Kindle store. Although facts remain in short supply, what little evidence we’ve seen indicates that $2.99 is the sweet spot for indie ebook fiction. Will that price point creep up if readers grow to accept paying about the same for Singles?

Or does price matter under a certain threshhold? I’ve been wondering lately if, once you hit a low enough point, “price” is decoupled from “value” in the consumer’s mind, and he stops counting it as an important factor in the decision to buy. At that point maybe the item moves into impulse-buy space, and the reader is basing his decision off of something less predictable: do I have time to read this right now, and will it satisfy me enough to offset the time cost?

However pricing works out, I’m glad to see someone making a strong push to sell shorter works. There’s been a lot of talk about how digital publishing gives publishers room to sell articles, essays, short stories and novellas that aren’t financially feasible in print, but other than a couple of successful brand name experiments (Dean Koontz’s “Darkness Under the Sun” and several works from Stephen King), I think publishers have been slow to develop this market. Someday maybe they’ll figure out that if there’s any money left on the table, Amazon will develop a way to take it.

One of the authors in the Singles program is Larry Dignan, the editor in chief at ZDNet and the editorial director at TechRepublic. In a post today he describes why he chose to pitch his idea to Amazon Singles and what the process has been like. Other than the pitch process, it sounds very similar to the same workflow that indie publishers know from the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform (formerly DTP). If you’re curious about sales figures, pricing, and general insight on the Singles program, he may be worth watching, since it looks like he’ll be blogging about it occasionally. (Which reminds me: I think blogging about your book as a form of promotion should be called Konrathing.)

Update: According to Publishers Weekly, TEDBooks is launching with these three Singles titles, but eventually plans to spread out to other ebook platforms, so it won’t be Amazon-only.

Kindle Singles [Amazon]

(Photo: colindunn)