The FJP

Amazon and Long-form Journalism

Anecdotal evidence is trickling in that Amazon is turning into a legitimate outlet for long-form journalism.

For example, Marc Herman recently wrote about Libya for The Atlantic and then turned his additional reporting into a Kindle Single selling for $1.99. Current result: the title is in Kindle’s top 500 and Herman is on pace to recoup the costs of his Libya trip.

Over at GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes:

As newspapers and even magazines have declined in both reach and financial health, there has been a lot of concern expressed about the future of journalism — particularly longer-form or what some call “investigative journalism.” This is arguably where the most value lies, especially when breaking news can easily be aggregated by outlets like The Huffington Post or distributed widely for nothing. But how does this kind of journalism pay for itself? Herman’s example is one potential answer to that question: it pays for itself when readers subsidize the writer directly for content that they appreciate.

Permalink
45

The show went on sale at noon on Saturday, December 10th. 12 hours later, we had over 50,000 purchases and had earned $250,000, breaking even on the cost of production and website. As of Today, we’ve sold over 110,000 copies for a total of over $500,000. Minus some money for PayPal charges etc, I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58). This is less than I would have been paid by a large company to simply perform the show and let them sell it to you, but they would have charged you about $20 for the video. They would have given you an encrypted and regionally restricted video of limited value, and they would have owned your private information for their own use. They would have withheld international availability indefinitely. This way, you only paid $5, you can use the video any way you want, and you can watch it in Dublin, whatever the city is in Belgium, or Dubai. I got paid nice, and I still own the video (as do you). You never have to join anything, and you never have to hear from us again.

I really hope people keep buying it a lot, so I can have shitloads of money, but at this point I think we can safely say that the experiment really worked.

Louis CK with a sales report for his Live at the Beacon Theater show that he produced, directed and began selling for $5 off of his site this past weekend.

Conde Nast Hearts Apple

Via Mashable:

Digital subscription and single-copy sales have spiked following the launch of Apple’s Newsstand app two weeks ago.

Magazine publisher Conde Nast has seen a 268% jump in digital subscriptions sales per week on average, Monica Ray, Conde Nast’s EVP of consumer marketing, announced Tuesday. Single copy sales across its titles have risen 142% compared to the previous eight weeks.