Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

New homes for stories that fall between a book and an article...

...There are other new places where the long article-cum-short book has a chance. Sites like Longform.org and Longreads.com are compiling richer and more thorough stories, and Byliner’s own website, Byliner.com, is updated daily with summaries and links to literary nonfiction works, some published decades ago, available for free. The site currently points readers to more than ten thousand stories. Bryant describes Byliner.com as “curatorial,” to use the phrase du jour, as the site guides users toward worthy long-form material. It links to sites where the pieces are already available, or to pieces that authors have asked it to include. The owners talk about it as a “discovery engine” for finding authors you like, sort of like Pandora finds music. The site is also, of course, a distribution platform for Byliner Originals and generates a small amount of money when a user buys a book off of the Byliner site on Amazon. Eventually, the plan is to pursue advertising and sponsorship opportunities. But Byliner has other sources of funding, including an angel investor, says Bryant, a “social media Silicon Valley person....”