Plympton, the serialized fiction studio founded by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love, just announced (via blog post and at the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference) that it has acquired DailyLit, which breaks classic and contemporary novels down into short chunks and delivers them via email.
Plympton first emerged last year through a successful Kickstarter campaign (raising $56,588, nearly double the $30,000 goal) and partnerships with Amazon to provide content for the Kindle Serials program. At the time, Lee said that her team had a spent a lot of time thinking about how to make serialized content work in modern times (anyone writing about today’s serialized fiction efforts is contractually obligated to mention the success of writers like Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle more than a century ago).
This week, she told me she’s also realized that in order to build a big media company, you need both good content and good distribution. It’s on the second front that DailyLit can be especially useful, since it has supposedly delivered 50 million installments to more than 800,000 readers.
So in the short-term, we can expect to start seeing Plympton’s serialized fiction delivered to DailyLit subscribers (though Lee said it will continue to run content from other publishers as well). Lee also hinted at more ambitious integration plans that will be unveiled in about a month at South by Southwest.
DailyLit was founded by husband-and-wife team Susan Danziger (who previously worked at publisher Random House) and Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger. Danziger and Wenger aren’t joining Plympton in a full-time capacity, but as a result of the deal, they are becoming investors and advisors.
In the blog post announcing the deal, Lee writes:
Our vision for the future of DailyLit tackles a number of problems that are facing publishers, authors, and independent bookstores as reading becomes increasingly digitized. Susan and Albert have already created a robust platform for delivering great writing, having launched almost 1,000 critically acclaimed titles from a number of major publishers.
We at Plympton want to bring the DailyLit experience up-to-date by developing new and engaging ways to give readers more power than ever to read what they want, when and where they want.
The post also reveals that Plympton has hired Jacqueline Chang (most recently an engineer at StumbleUpon) as CTO and technical co-founder.
Plympton is reviving serialized fiction for the digital age through a mobile reading experience that delivers content in short installments that fit naturally into people’s daily lives. The company commissions original writing, offers a a rich library of classic texts and serves as a platform for other publishers to serialize their own content. Of the eight inaugural Kindle Serials launched by Amazon, Plympton produced 3 of them. In February 2013, Plympton acquired DailyLit, the oldest and largest digital distributor of daily...
DailyLit is the oldest and largest digital distributor of daily serialized fiction, acquired in early 2013 by Plympton Inc. Chosen as the #1 book website by the Sunday Times in London, DailyLit has been delivering great books and series in short installments directly to readers’ inboxes since 2006. Hundreds of thousands of readers have received over 50 million installments through DailyLit. This combination of DailyLit’s worldwide distribution platform together with Plympton’s original serial fiction presents a unique and exciting...
Albert combines over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience with an in-depth technology background. As an entrepreneur, he has founded or co-founded five companies, including a management consulting firm (in Germany), a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc (now E*Tradebank), an early stage investment firm, and most recently (with his wife), DailyLit, a service for reading books by email or RSS. Albert also served as the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo. His technology...
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