“This American short fiction app is hoping its author quality control will attract a wide audience to its mobile story ‘bursts'”, says Molly Flatt over at The Bookseller’s Futurebook.
Flatt is discussing Great Jones Street, the latest addition to the mobile-first short reads realm.
Founded in 2015 by Kelly Abbott, Great Jones Street joins the likes of Explory and oolipo (oolipo, no capital required, is releasing new tools this month at Frankfurt) in bringing new models of short fiction to smartphone readers.
In the case of Great Jones Street that means, in Abbott’s words, “high quality, snack-sized stories to quickly challenge (the reader’s) intellect and provide a sublime escape.”
Not to be confused with curated serialised fiction for smartphone readers from the likes of Radish, The Pigeon Hole and others.
The curation system is simple and elegant, and may make Great Jones Street stand out from its rivals. Having hand-picked the initial contributors, Abbott then passes the baton to the selected authors to invite the next.
In the year since its launch, Flatt says, “Great Jones Street has become the largest purchaser of short fiction annually in the United States,” and is making its short fiction available on Medium.
“Today,” says Abbott, “consumers are buying more fiction than when the Kindle came out,” adding Great Jones Street is “another piece of the contemporary content chain that fits right into the social media model for publishers,” echoing a theme you’ll hear often here at The New Publishing Standard, where the Global New Renaissance is being tracked day by day.
