DailyLit, an online venture that delivers fiction to busy consumers via daily e-mail installments, is being relaunched with a redesigned Web site, new offerings of contemporary and classic literature and plans to add poetry and plays in the coming weeks. The site has offered works by acclaimed authors such as Alice Munro and Jhumpa Lahiri and plans to offer original fiction in addition to releasing an iOS app in 2014
“We’ve decided to go back to our roots and focus on what DailyLit has always done best: literature,” said Yael Goldstein Love, editorial director of DailyLit and cofounder of Plympton, which acquired DailyLit earlier this year. Founded in 2006, DailyLit has built a mailing list of more than 100,000 subscribers and delivered more than 50 million installments of serialized novels and short stories since its launch.
DailyLit CEO Jennifer 8. Lee said the revamped site will initially focus on public domain content, which is free to consumers, and that premium for-pay content will be rolled out in the coming weeks at varying prices depending on the length of the content and will include novels, novellas, short fiction and bundled short story packages. New content will include both original DailyLit fiction and premium content from a variety of publishers. Lee said she was in conversations with Big Five, indie and digital-first publishers about premium content (both frontlist and backlist) that will be offered a la carte and via a subscription model. She said more pricing information will be released in the coming weeks.
DailyLit offers a database of about 200 fiction titles currently but plans to add more quickly, Lee said. Since its acquisition by Plympton, the site plans to add original fiction including work by National Book Awards winner Julia Glass and Pulitzer Prize finalist Adam Haslett. The site is also partnering with Audible to turn its original short fiction into audiobooks.
Lee said, “It’s amazing to see how deeply engaged and responsive our DailyLit readership is. These are people who are passionate about reading, and always eager to try new things — whether it’s to give feedback with the redesign of a website, or be the first to try out a new author.”
