The Hunt for Bin Laden single has been the #1 Kindle Single pretty much from it’s launch. It’s also hovered around the #50 range in the entire e-book store on Amazon. What does that translate to in terms of hard numbers of sales? A friend of mine had a #1 Kindle Single that proceeded to stay in the top 20 Singles for a couple of months. He said he was told that the sales were headed for a total of about 10,000. At $2, $3 a pop, nobody is going to get rich on that. But it might just be a form that is only in the early stages of catching on. With the low overhead, including the reduced amount of resources and time that go into a 15,000 word piece (as opposed to a 90,000 word full-length book), it won’t take much more in the way of popularity to make this a very positive development for writers.
Author & Editor
Blog
On being Single
Is the Kindle Single the Salvation of Story-Telling?
The Post asked me to take 15 years of reporting on the Hunt for Bin Laden and edit it into a single narrative, which they then gave to Amazon to distribute electronically as “Kindle Single.” It’s 18,000 words and costs $1.99 to instantly download into your e-reader. There is suddenly an apparently thriving market in these not-quite-book-but-more-than-article type pieces. Production costs, practically zero. Distribution costs, practically zero. Price barrier? Negligible. Could this be the salvation of non-fiction story-telling?
Tiger Fatigue — Hear Me Rory
Here’s the way a great columnist can capture the zeitgeist in a phrase: Sally Jenkins on Tiger fatigue after Rory McIlroy’s historic win at Congressional . . .
“I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a new champion who doesn’t treat the world as his spittoon.”
Post Hunt IV
Chatting with Gene and Dave today at 11 at washingtonpost.com/posthunt
Hunt Sunday
If you are able to come out to the Post Hunt that starts noon Sunday in downtown DC, when things die down from the zany and (for us) terrifying kickoff, around 1 pm, stop me and say hi. I’ll be wandering with an expression of dazed anxiety. Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten and I chatted about it on the Post site today for an hour, without giving out a single bit of useful info.
Bad Blogger!
I keep neglecting this blog because “blogging” turns out to involve “writing.” But I hereby apologize to my legions of fan for being such a poor correspondent. Lots of stuff going on with various Story Surgeons projects, so maybe I’ll just update here so this space can maintain its well-deserved reputation as “blog of record.”
* T.M. Shine’s hilarious picaresque novel, Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You didn’t become a bestseller, as I’d hoped and it deserved, but months after publication it was chosen for a Florida Book Award, where it was in some pretty distinguished company. Now the paperback will be brought out in September — go out and buy it. Or just stay in and click it.
* Scott Higham’s and Sari Horwitz’s book Finding Chandra, which was nominated for a Poe award, was the basis of a TLC documentary, starring . . . Scott and Sari, who both demonstrated excellent TV talking head chops.
* Snigdha Prakash’s fabulous book All the Justice Money Can Buy — a kind of Civil Action narrative about the battle between Big Pharma (Merck, makers of VIOXX) and Big Personal Injury Lawyers, a titanic struggle that leaves the victims as mere footnotes — will be published in June. Snigdha will be at Politics and Prose on June 18.
* I’ll be talking about Fire on the Horizon at the Gaithersburg Book Festival at 11 a.m. on May 21. I was so tickled to discover that FOH made it into one of my favorite venues, Hank Stuever’s One-Man Book Club, and if you follow Hank on Twitter you’ll get noticed everytime he uncorks one of these perfect and perfectly solipsistic reflections on reading on his website, Tinsel.
Guess I need to go and face my intimidating to-do list, including depositing cash money in my son’s bank account, which also necessitates doing the kind of writing that actually provides said money.
Fire on the Horizon on NPR
NPR’s Weekend Edition interview with my co-author about Fire on the Horizon: http://links.visibli.com/links/db3962
Fire on the Horizon reviews in Daily Beast and Miami Herald
New Editor’s Roundtable
I’ve been participating in a monthly gig for the Nieman Foundation’s website devoted to narrative journalism. Each month, a group of editors discuss, tweeze, slam, praise, or whatever a notable piece of long-form journalism. The first month (February) was on David von Drehle’s Time piece on the Tucson shootings. This month’s discussion is about Mac McClelland’s Mother Jones piece on rampant rape in Haiti’s displaced person camps. It’s worth taking a look.
