Just over a year ago, Amazon launched Kindle Singles as a format for shorter stories – memoirs, essays, arguments, fiction – meant to be read on a Kindle e-reader but also available online by way of an app. They’re a fast buy, a fast download and a fast read. Back then, Singles were mostly being touted as a way to circumvent the writer-agent-publisher triumvirate by allowing un- and lesser-knowns to sell substantial, stand-alone work that hadn’t been published elsewhere. (Kindle Singles aren’t promoted like books, but because they are an in-house product of the biggest online store in the world, they don’t have to be.) By now, they have demonstrated a complicated potential to stand in for something else.
Singles are sold on Amazon with the too-easy “Buy now with 1 click” link, and cost between one and five dollars. They run from around 5,000 or 10,000 words to 30,000 words, whatever is the “length best suited to the ideas they present.” But these days, even 5,000 words is a lot. A music-critic friend of mine wrote, “I wish I had ‘Riff’ space” on Gchat yesterday, referencing the 1,750 or so words that occupy a rotating, super-coveted Sunday New York Times magazine column, representative of the mostly disappeared space for a writer to, you know, write. That particular stretch, the five, ten, twenty-thousand-word stretch, which is still and crucially closer to an article about just one thing than a daunting, defining book, is where the possibilities of the Kindle Single begin for the writers who are releasing them.
With far fewer venues (and commensurately fewer ad sales and available pages and paycheques) to publish long-form work, both fiction and non-fiction, which were among the first kinds of journalism to go when the Internet tore through the industry, there was almost nowhere for even sure things like Christopher Hitchens (whose Single about Osama bin Laden is called The Enemy) or Stephen King (his is Mile 81, a short story) to pursue a mid-length piece. (I write columns for a monthly glossy, a weekly magazine, a daily newspaper and a popular website, but I usually can’t afford to write anything longer than 1,500 words.)
This is especially true in Canada. Derek Finkle, a journalist and the director of an agency that represents freelance writers, and who is developing a Canadian answer to the long-form problem, says “There aren’t that many venues for long-form journalism in this country, period,” even though Canadians “punch considerably above their weight class when it comes to purchasing long-form non-fiction online.” (I write columns for a monthly glossy, a weekly magazine and a daily newspaper, but I usually can’t afford to write anything longer than 1,500 words.)
The Amazon-legitimacy, high royalties and online utility of the Kindle Single is a not-insignificant prospect, if still a new one, for some writers. Sloane Crosley’s books I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number? apply a smart-girl sensibility to the David Sedaris self-deprecation tradition; her Kindle Single Up the Down Volcano is described as “her first full-length essay since her second book,” an essay that once upon a time would have been a few-dollars-a-word feature in a national magazine, or a chapter in the next book. That book, though, would require a few years of labour and promotion and a retreat from the Twitter cycle; a Single contains the same scope of an idea, with fewer risks to author and publisher, and far more right-now Facebook-frisson.
