You Need Some Kindle-ing to Start a Fire

Many of you have been reading John August's posts lately about his short story, "The Variant" that was released by John via several online download portals including Amazon's Kindle.

It's an important step forward, just like Whedon's DR. HORRIBLE was for video and reinforces several precepts we hold near and dear here at Pulp 2.0:

1. You can do it yourself.

2. Branding is important. John says he wouldn't have been as successful if he hadn't had a rep as the screenwriter of (insert Tim Burton or McG movie here).

3. More and more opportunities are happening every day that allow you to make money with your creative content - stories, books, comics, video, audio, merchandise...

4. This is where the industry(s) is (are) transitioning.

But also - let's talk about what this means as it relates to the future forms of media. There's a lot of cool nuggets buried underneath this release...

Note how John released a short story online and people bought it. Not a book or a magazine, but a byte-sized chunk of content. If one were to look back at the music industry you could see this falls right in line with what people are consuming via the web - singles. It's one of the things that has made Itunes so successful as a business model.

For the longest time people were saying the short story market was dead...I think perhaps its resurrection is all-digital.

"Magazines" will simply be areas on the web where similarly themed stories will be stored. People will pay for stories they like based on the logline and a preview and the reputation of the writer/artist (I'm definitely including comics in this scenario, gang) and the tastemaker editors and publishers.

But most importantly there's a revitalized market for self-contained short stories where there was a bloated print corpse in the traditional markets.

This isn't new, I and several others have written for Astonishing Adventures. Other publishers have original genre fiction online...

But right now, based on the numbers that August has and where the bulk of the money comes from, it looks like the economics of it are beginning to catch up to our vision.

Thoughts in the comments, please.