Mining the Literary Middle Ground: Byliner and The Atavist

Publishing Perspectives

Online start-ups Byliner and The Atavist have established a market for stories too long for magazines and too short for books.

How long should a book be? For more than a century, publishers and authors have understood that most commercial books, to be profitable and viable, should come in around 250 pages.
Two American startups, Byliner and The Atavist, are looking for an answer to this question in the middle ground between 5,000 word magazine articles and 100,000 words books. Earlier this year, both started publishing creative non-fiction titles that are too long to fit into a magazine or too short to fill a book.


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