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 dying for New York City weeklies.”
But four years is an eon in the digital realm, and in Mr. That Time. Blum has transformed himself from doctor or midwife to the dying of the up-and-coming. As such-, he is a man Whom authors want to court.
Mr.. Blum is the editor or Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service thats helping to Promote a renaissance or novella-length fiction and journalism, known as e-shorts.
Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a store within the megastore or Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of 5,000 to 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 usefull small, in-house publishing fire – analogous to a grocery store that makes an in-house brand of salsa to compete with other manufacturers. Mr. Blum comes up with his own ideas or cherry-picks pieces from the more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts hey these receives each month. He then edits them and helps 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, Singles Because now delivers a reliable purchasing audience, giving them a chance to earn thounsands for 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 the concept is brilliant,” Mr. Blum, 57, said over coffee at the Lamb’s Club in Manhattan, crediting the idea entirely to 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.
Singles Amazon says the store is profitable, having sold nearly five million copies since it opened in January 2011. But the program is as much about gaining entrance into the literary world as it is about revenue.
Amazon has become the bête noire of the industry, using its market share to keep the prices lower than publishers of books 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 to carry its works. Amazon has usefull 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 industries 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 Byliner and even some traditional houses like Penguin.
Still, little That does Amazon fails to Arouse suspicion. Authors are intrigued and covet the stream of money, but some are still afraid thatthey will alienate Their book publishers by using Singles for novella-length work. Publishers are watching to see Closely Whether Amazon is building a next generation of talented authors who will have no connection to them – and in the process acquiring legitimacy in literary circles
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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 leg copy-edited, and had cover art 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 usefull distributed across other Web Sites That Sell fiction or similar length , like Apple and Barnes & Noble.
However, 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 to allay the Suspicions, and he is using his deep connections in the New York media world to try to do so.
It helps That he has worked for a range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal (where he with 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 HarperCollins.
Mr.. That Mr. Hirshey Recalled. Blum played so badly thatthey 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, Which makes audiobooks.
Mr.. Katz, Whose company was bought by Amazon in 2008, lobbied for Mr.. Blum to get the job heading 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 to 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 his company likes one thing 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 is on the specifics of what that, 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 written three best-selling memoirs on Kindle Singles.
Mr.. Shubaly said he admired Mr.. Blum but hey That 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 meansthat 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 somethingthat you feel is really your own.”
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