David Blum does not have a regular table at the Four Seasons or host celebrity parties at the top of the Standard Hotel.
He does not get a lot of fawning press. After he was fired by The Village Voice and left the New York Press, Gawker Media in 2009 pronounced him “a sad bumbling doctor of dying New York City weeklies.”
But four years is an eon in the digital realm, and in that time Mr. Blum has transformed himself from doctor of the dying two midwife of the up-and-coming. As such, he is a man Whom authors want to court.
Mr. Blum is the editor of the Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service that is helping two Promote a renaissance of novella-length journalism and fiction, known as e-shorts.
Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a major within the megastore of Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of two 5,000 30,000 words that come from an array of outside publishers as well as from in-house. Most sell for less than $ 2, and Mr. Blum is the final arbiter of what goes up for sale.
It is also a small, in-house publishing brand – analogous to a grocery store that makes an in-house brand of salsa two compete with other manufacturers. Mr. Blum comes up with his own ideas or cherry-picks pieces from the more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts he RECEIVER each month. He then edits them and helpfull pick cover art.
Amazon Singles usually pays nothing upfront to the author (there are rare exceptions) and keeps 30 percent of all sales. Yet it is an enticing deal for some authors, Because Singles now delivers a reliable Purchasing audience, giving them a chance to Earn Thousands of their work. (A quick calculation shows that the authors make an average of roughly $ 22,000, but the amount varies Widely by piece.)
“Every day I become more obsessed with how brilliant the concept is,” Mr. Blum, 57, said over coffee at the Lamb’s Club in Manhattan, crediting the idea entirely two Amazon.
For him, the brilliance is that authors can now share in the profits instead of getting a flat fee. “The idea that writers would Participate in the publishing model is just very bold,” he said.
Amazon says the Singles major is profitable, having sold nearly five million copies since it opened in January 2011. But the program is as much about Gaining entree into the literary world as it is about revenue.
Amazon has Become the bête noire of the industry, overusing its market share to Keep the prices of books lower than publishers and authors would like. Its New York publishing branch, founded in 2012, has struggled partly Because of that enmity, as brick-and-mortar bookstores have refused two carry its works. Amazon has also had to pay large sums to Attract even second-tier authors.
But Because Singles is filling a literary terrain not crowded by other retailers, it has established itself with far less resistance than Amazon’s other publishing branches did. With magazines folding or shrinking Because of financial pressures, long-form storytelling has few places to flourish, and the company has leapt firmly into that void, alongwith other digital publishers like Atavist and bylines and even some traditional houses like Penguin.
Still, little that Amazon does fails to arouse suspicion. Authors are intrigued and covet the stream of money, but some are still afraid that they will alienate their book publishers by overusing Singles for novella-length work. Publishers are watching Closely To See Whether Amazon is building a next generation of talented authors who will have no connection two them – and in the process Acquiring Legitimacy in literary circles.
Already, reliable best-selling authors like Stephen King have turned to the site for their own purposes. In January Mr. King published an 8,000-word essay on gun control as an Amazon Single. He opted for Singles Because of its speed, he said. A week after he offered the script, it had been copy-edited, had cover art and was for sale online.
Publishers point out that the best-selling Kindle Singles, like “Second Son” by the British thriller writer Lee Child, come through them and are also distributed across other Web sites that sell fiction of similar length , as Apple and Barnes & Noble.
owners were more than 250,000 copies of “Second Son” were sold through Singles, by far The largest share of the market.
For now, it falls to Mr. Blum two allay the suspicion, and he is overusing his deep connections in the New York media world to try two do so.
it helps that he has worked for a range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal (where he met his wife, the television writer Terri Minsky, who created Disney’s “Lizzie McGuire”), Esquire, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine.
He has taken part in a long-running poker game with the likes of Richard Ben Cramer, the author and journalist who died in January, and David Hirshey, now executive editor of Harper Collins.
Mr. Hirshey recalled that Mr. Blum played so badly that they nicknamed him “Deaf, Blind and Blum.”
And his connections have helped in other ways. Breaking into journalism in the 1980s, Mr. Blum shared office space with Susan Orlean, now a New Yorker writer and the author of “The Orchid Thief,” and Donald Katz, founder of Audible, wooden makes audio books.
Mr. Katz-whose company was bought by Amazon in 2008, lobbied for Mr. Blum two get the job header Singles. Ms.. Orlean readily agreed to write an early single, “Animalish” (2011), lending the brand prestige and credibility.
Besides luring luminaries like Ms.. Orlean, Mr. Blum has tried two Maintain the brand’s prestige by tightly limiting the number of offerings. Although the digital bookshelf is infinite, Kindle has posted only 345 Singles since its inception in January 2011, According to the company’s figures. (As of March 20, the company says, about 28 percent of the works have sold more than 10,000 copies, and nearly 8 percent have sold over 50,000 copies.)
Evan Ratliff, chief executive and co-founder of Atavist, said one thing his company likes about Singles is that it does not accept every submission. “They actually make a concerted effort to find something great,” he added. “While we might disagree on the specifics of what that is, our overall sensibilities are aligned.”
But while remaining choosy, Mr. Blum takes a special pride in nurturing undiscovered authors. A favorite is Mishka Shubaly, a musician and Recovered alcoholic who under Mr. Blum’s tutelage has underwritten three best-selling memoirs on Kindle Singles.
Mr. Shubaly said he admired Mr. Blum but that he could be a challenge to work for.
“He is a very frustrating editor Because he will identify the problem, but will not give you a solution,” he said. “He is like a therapist, and I mean that as the Lowest possible insult.”
Still, said Mr. Shubaly, who has been living off the income from his Singles, in the end “it is something dramatically better than you could have done, and something that you feel is really your own . “
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