He does not get a lot of fawning press. After he was fired by The Village Voice and left The New York Press, Gawker Media in 2009 pronounced him “a sad bumbling doctor for dying New York City weeklies.”

But four years is an eon in the digital realm, and in that time Mr. Blum has transformed himself from doctor of the dying to midwife of the up-and-coming. As such, he is a man whom authors want to court.

Mr. Blum is the editor of Amazon Kindle Singles, a Web service that is helping to promote a renaissance of novella-length journalism and fiction, known as e-shorts.

Amazon Kindle Singles is a hybrid. First, it is a store within the megastore of Amazon.com, offering a showcase of carefully selected original works of 5,000 to 30,000 words that come from an array of outside publishers as well as from in-house. Most sell for less than $2, and Mr. Blum is the final arbiter of what goes up for sale.

It is also a small, in-house publishing brand — analogous to a grocery store that makes an in-house brand of salsa to compete with other manufacturers. Mr. Blum comes up with his own ideas or cherry-picks pieces from the more than 1,000 unsolicited manuscripts he receives each month. He then edits them and helps pick cover art.

Amazon Singles usually pays nothing upfront to the author (there are rare exceptions) and keeps 30 percent of all sales. Yet it is an enticing deal for some authors, because Singles now delivers a reliable purchasing audience, giving them a chance to earn thousands for their work. (A quick calculation shows that the authors make an average of roughly $22,000, but the amount varies widely by piece.)

“Every day I become more obsessed with how brilliant the concept is,” Mr. Blum, 57, said over coffee at the Lamb’s Club in Manhattan, crediting the idea entirely to Amazon.

For him, the brilliance is that authors can now share in the profits instead of getting a flat fee. “The idea that writers would participate in the publishing model is just very bold,” he said.

Amazon says the Singles store is profitable, having sold nearly five million copies since it opened in January 2011. But the program is as much about gaining entree into the literary world as it is about revenue.

Amazon has become the bête noire of the industry, using its market share to keep the prices of books lower than publishers and authors would like. Its New York publishing branch, founded in 2012, has struggled partly because of that enmity, as brick-and-mortar bookstores have refused to carry its works. Amazon has also had to pay large sums to attract even second-tier authors.

But because Singles is filling a literary terrain not crowded by other retailers, it has established itself with far less resistance than Amazon’s other publishing branches did. With magazines folding or shrinking because of financial pressures, long-form storytelling has few places to flourish, and the company has leapt firmly into that void, along with other digital publishers like Atavist and Byliner and even some traditional houses like Penguin.

Still, little that Amazon does fails to arouse suspicion. Authors are intrigued and covet the stream of money, but some are still afraid that they will alienate their book publishers by using Singles for novella-length work. Publishers are watching closely to see whether Amazon is building a next generation of talented authors who will have no connection to them — and in the process acquiring legitimacy in literary circles.

Already, reliable best-selling authors like Stephen King have turned to the site for their own purposes. In January Mr. King published an 8,000-word essay on gun control as an Amazon Single. He opted for Singles because of its speed, he said. A week after he offered the script, it had been copy-edited, had cover art and was for sale online.

Publishers point out that the best-selling Kindle Singles, like “Second Son,” by the British thriller writer Lee Child, come through them and are also distributed across other Web sites that sell fiction of similar length, like Apple and Barnes Noble.

However, more than 250,000 copies of “Second Son” were sold through Singles, by far the largest share of the market.

For now, it falls to Mr. Blum to allay the suspicions, and he is using his deep connections in the New York media world to try to do so.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/books/with-kindle-singles-david-blum-jump-starts-his-career.html?partner=rss&emc=rss