Amazon has now made its lineup of Singles offerings available today. Singles were first promised in the fall of last year. The content is shorter than full-blown novels but longer than magazine articles, with word counts between 5,000 and 30,000. The format is officially pitched as a way to let writers express a single idea that’s well researched and allow them enough space to do so.
The Singles are priced at between $1 and $5 and available for users of the Kindle e-reader and Kindle app users. The first set of singles includes original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction, usually at prices of $2 to $3, and Amazon plans to frequently update the offerings.
Authors purportedly enjoy the concept of the Singles, with Ian Ayres, writer of The $500 Diet, saying he has the “freedom to write a piece that doesn’t need to be cut for a magazine article or expanded for a book.”
The format is more widely considered an attempt by Amazon to spur e-book downloads by lowering the price well below the typical $10 asking price for a full novel or non-fiction book.
