by: Julie Bosman
If a song on iTunes sells for 99 cents, how about a literary essay?
On Tuesday, Scribner began publishing 69 essays by Chuck Klosterman, the pop culture and sports writer, available individually from retailers like Amazon, Apple and BN.com for 99 cents each.
Nearly all of the essays, which include “Fargo Rock City, for Real” and “All I Know is What I Read in the Papers,” have appeared in print books before. But Scribner is hoping that consumers who have become accustomed to buying songs individually might do the same for stand-alone literary.
Mr. Klosterman, the best-selling author of “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” and “Eating the Dinosaur,” has written on culture, music, sports and media, and collected a diverse following of readers along the way. The plan to publish his essays individually was hatched more than a year and a half ago, said Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster whose list of writers includes Annie Proulx, Laura Bush and Frank McCourt.
“We thought, it’s a shame not to follow the iTunes model here, because you have all these essays and they’re all on different subjects and we could recast them,” Ms. Moldow said. “It harkens back in a funny way because for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the best thing that could happen to them would be that a story was published in Life magazine or The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker. The idea of stories being sold in individual units is as old as stories.”
Scribner will also publish digital collections of Mr. Klosterman’s essays — “Chuck Klosterman on Rock” and “Chuck Klosterman on Sports,” for instance — for $7.99 each.
Other publishers have recently experimented with selling short stories and essays in bite-sized digital form. Last year, The Atlantic began selling short stories exclusively on Amazon.com for $3.99 each, beginning with works by Edna O’Brien and Christopher Buckley.
One Story, a literary magazine that publishes one short story every three weeks, offers a monthly subscription for $1.49, automatically sending a story to subscribers’ e-reading devices at the same time it is available in print.
The Penguin Group calls its version “eSpecials” and includes both short stories and essays, ranging in price from $2.99 to $6. In August, Random House Children’s Books published “The Death of Joan of Arc,” a short story available only in digital format for 99 cents.
Last year, HarperCollins published individual stories by Oscar Wilde, Willa Cather and Tolstoy, said Ana Maria Allessi, the vice president and publisher of HarperMedia.
“We have to take advantage of the format,” Ms. Alessi said, noting that it would be difficult to sell an individual short story in bookstores. “You really couldn’t do this in print.”
From: NY Times
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