numbers aren’t interesting’. So the VCs were hoping that Byliner would be acquired. ‘And you take VC money, you’re assuming that your exit is going to have a multiple’, continued John. For technology investors in Silicon Valley, the multiples can be as high as 20, 50 or 100 times what they’re putting in, though multiples of that kind are rare. Investors recognize that most of their investments will fail; they’re looking for a return on one in ten investments, and one has to hit at a multiple that will compensate for the losses accrued by the other nine. The VCs who had invested in Byliner soon realized that they weren’t going to be able to exit with a serious multiple, but they hoped nonetheless that they would be able to exit with something – what’s euphemistically described in VC jargon as a soft landing.
In early 2014, Byliner was at a critical juncture. They weren’t generating enough revenue to sustain a viable business at their current level of staffing, and they were unlikely to be able to raise further venture capital given their trajectory of growth. Could they have scaled back, reduced their staff and overheads and restructured the business as a small, boutique publishing operation specializing in e-singles? Possibly. That might have been an option. But scaling back and turning yourself into a boutique business is not part of the script for a VC-funded company – it’s not an option that would be of any interest to their investors. Nor did this option appeal to its founder. He had already devoted four years of his life to pursuing this particular dream and given it everything, so the idea of managing the decline of the business was hardly an attractive prospect. Moreover, he was finding it difficult to hold on to his staff, especially the software engineers. ‘This is such a super-heated growth environment that for anyone who’s on the technology side, there are many better opportunities than trying to eke out a nice little nifty publishing play. It’s hard to get and retain staff, and be honest with staff, because they’re going to lunch with people whose company trajectories are from launch product to hundred-million-dollar acquisition in months, much less years.’ Staff began to leave, and John himself got tired. ‘I’m a writer, and I hadn’t written anything for four years. I found myself running a company and going into the office every day and not being excited about the growth.’ He took a back seat, brought in someone else to run the company and started doing other things. In September 2014, it was announced that Byliner had been sold to Vook, a New York-based company that offers digital publishing services to authors and organizations.4 It’s not exactly the exit John would have liked – ‘I would have loved for the team to have a giant exit’, he confessed. But there’s no shame in a soft landing either.
The three-year story of the rise and fall of Byliner suggests that, while there may well be a market for short books published as ebooks only, this market is probably not sufficiently robust to support a standalone publishing operation. The flooding of the market with content and the downward pressure on prices, creating a category where 99¢ has become the norm, have meant that it’s difficult to generate revenue growth and achieve profitability on the basis of publishing e-singles only. Byliner was able to pioneer the development of e-singles with the help of venture capital funding but it never achieved the kind of growth or scale that was meaningful in the VC world of Silicon Valley, and never achieved the kind of profitability that might have enabled it to float off as a boutique indie publisher, even if that option had been open to it. It published some remarkable and successful books in its short life, but the model was unsustainable in the long run.
But maybe Byliner had been too conservative. Maybe you needed to be more radical in the way you were thinking about digital publishing – not just doing ebooks that were shorter than traditional print books, but experimenting in more fundamental ways with the very form of the book, creating ebooks that incorporate the multimedia features that are possible in the digital medium. Maybe another venture with a more radical agenda would stand a greater chance of success – would it?
A radical experiment
In 2012, the media businessman Barry Diller and film producer Scott Rudin approached the former Vintage and Picador publisher Frances Coady with the idea of starting a new kind of publishing company. Barry was Chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp, a large digital media company headquartered in the Frank Gehry-designed building in the Chelsea district of New York; they owned a range of internet-based businesses, including The Daily Beast and match.com, the online dating service, and they were looking for new ideas to expand their digital holdings. Why not try to invent a new kind of publishing for the digital age? Start afresh, find someone very clever who knows a lot about publishing, invest a substantial amount of money – say $20 million – and see what happens. Try to imagine what the book is going to look like in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time and create it now. Experiment with the future. This was 2012 and the digital revolution was in full swing. Ebooks were soaring and the future was digital, surely. Here was a well-funded opportunity to marry the old world of publishing with the new world of hi-tech. For someone with a love of books and a taste for adventure, the opportunity was irresistible – Frances couldn’t say no. She suggested to Barry and Scott that they should consider collaborating with The Atavist Magazine, a Brooklyn-based internet start-up that had built a platform to experiment with new kinds of storytelling in an online environment. It was a great platform, visually beautiful, and it enabled people to engage with stories in innovative ways. They would be the perfect partner: Frances and her colleagues could use their platform and benefit from their technical skills, and The Atavist Magazine, as a hard-pressed start-up, would welcome a cash injection. And so, in September 2012, Atavist Books was born.
Given a free hand, Frances’s plan was to experiment as radically as she could with digital publishing – ‘I want to make, first and foremost, beautiful ebooks.’ The Atavist Magazine had demonstrated the aesthetic potential of the digital medium and she wanted to do something similar for ebooks – turn them into something beautiful. Don’t just take an existing ebook and ‘enhance’ it by adding a few bells and whistles – rather, think of the ebook as a digital project and create something entirely new, an ebook with sound and movement, something which barely existed at the time. It seemed pretty clear to Frances that these digital books, or projects, should be short – partly because, at that time, Byliner was already up and running and their style of e-singles seemed to be gaining some traction, and partly because The Atavist Magazine was working with a similar form, though in their case they thought of their stories as ‘long-form journalism’. But, apart from being short, there were no constraints: invent a new form – whether we still want to call it a book is neither here nor there.
Frances didn’t just want to do beautiful ebooks, however: she also wanted to do print and to experiment with the relation between print and digital – experiment with pricing, with timing, with how the print book relates to the ebook, and with the very format of print itself. Rather than printing a hardcover edition, for example, try printing an expensive paperback with flaps and see how that goes. This part of the plan quickly ran into difficulties, however. Frances wanted to sign up excellent authors and, as a former publisher, she knew this meant that she had to talk to agents and persuade them to go with her plan. So she made presentations to agents. They loved the fact that she was going to pay competitive advances – that was music to the ears of an agent. They loved the ebook royalties, which were considerably higher than the 25 per cent of net receipts that was being paid by most traditional publishers. They loved the involvement of Barry Diller and Scott Rudin and the substantial financial backing of IAC. But when she said that she wanted to publish digital first, print later, there were gasps of astonishment. They wanted the windowing reversed – print first, digital later. Frances reminded them that this had been tried and it didn’t work, but there was a lot of resistance nonetheless, so she had to drop that idea straightaway (‘that whole brilliant idea was going down the tubes’). Acquiring the print rights was far from straightforward – they managed it with some authors, but for some of the more well-known authors, the agents held on to the rights for print editions and sold them to their traditional publishers.
Atavist Books published its first title in March 2014 – a 110-page digital-only novella by Karen Russell called Sleep Donation. Russell was a well-known writer whose
