Kindle Singles: Shorter, Cheaper E-Books for Kindle?
0
Amazon keeps adding more to its Kindle platform. The company has just announced Kindle Singles to allow authors to bring their shorter books to Kindle store. Not every book can be 400 pages long. Shorter e-books will be now classified under Kindle Singles on Amazon:
Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century—works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated—whether it’s a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.
… Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book.
There are some authors that go out of their ways to come up with 200+ pages for their ebook without really having that much to say. That is one of the many reasons people are skeptical about e-book prices these days. A 500 page book should not sell for $14.99 when it only has 200 pages of decent material. Amazon Kindle Singles will allow ethical authors to bring their works to Amazon Kindle Store without making any compromises:
Ideas and the words to deliver them should be crafted to their natural length, not to an artificial marketing length that justifies a particular price or a certain format … With Kindle Singles, we’re reaching out to publishers and accomplished writers and we’re excited to see what they create,
said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. Kindle Singles can be used by authors to sell chapters of their work. It can also be a life saver for independent authors who may not have a long enough book to work with traditional publishers.
Let’s hope people do not use this business model just to come up with more titles in a short period of time. After all, why write a long book when you can produce 10 shorter ones in the same period. Not all authors will take that approach. But there will be authors and marketers that will try to take full advantage of this development. In the meantime, this move means that Amazon probably won’t be bringing its e-book prices down from $9.99 anytime soon.
What are your thoughts on Kindle Singles?
