A literary studio that keeps finding new places to put a good story - the Kindle, an app, a subway car, a VR headset.
The wordmark, white on navy, of a company named for a street in Harvard Square. There is a whole publishing philosophy folded into that quiet piece of type - the idea that the story matters more than the format it happens to arrive in.
Here is a fact that should be more famous than it is. In 1836, Charles Dickens released The Pickwick Papers in cheap monthly installments, invented the cliffhanger economy, and got rich. The serialized novel was, for a while, the most successful content format in the English language. Then it mostly died, because the technology that carried it - the weekly magazine - died with it. The story was fine. The pipe broke.
Plympton, Inc. is a "literary studio" founded in 2011 by Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times reporter, and Yael Goldstein Love, a novelist. They named it after Plympton Street in Harvard Square, where they met, which is the kind of detail that tells you these are word people and not, say, a growth-hacking team that A/B tested the name. The pitch is unusual: take the development model Hollywood uses to make movies - where a studio works with talent from the very first idea, shapes it, and commits capital before there's a finished product - and apply it to books. Most publishers wait for a manuscript to arrive. Plympton starts earlier, with the idea.
That sounds like a small distinction. It is not. It changes what the company is. A publisher buys finished things. A studio makes things. And once you decide you are in the business of making, the question stops being "which manuscripts should we print" and becomes the far more interesting "where should stories live now that they no longer have to live on paper?" Plympton has spent more than a decade answering that question, one experiment at a time.
A former reporter for The New York Times and author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Yes, the numeral 8 is her actual middle name. She also produced The Search for General Tso, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. She brings the newsroom instinct: find the format the audience is already in, then put the story there.
A novelist, editor, and book critic who published The Passion of Tasha Darsky in 2007. She runs the editorial side - the part where a rough idea from a working writer becomes a book worth serializing. She is the reason Plympton reads like a house built by people who actually love sentences.
The tidy way to describe Plympton is "digital publisher." The honest way is to list the wildly different things it has shipped, because the range is the strategy. Same mission, new surface every time.
Plympton produced launch titles for Amazon's Kindle Serials program - novels delivered in installments of 8,000 to 25,000 words that auto-updated on your device. Dickens, but the magazine is a Kindle.
Acquired the pioneering service that mailed books to readers in short, inbox-sized installments. The revamped platform relaunched under Plympton.
A subscription reading app. For $4.99 a month it picked two books - one contemporary, one classic - and fed them to you in bite-sized pieces. The pitch was not "read more." It was "read what fits."
A crowdsourced project commissioning beautiful new covers for public-domain books, including a print run with Warby Parker. The insight: the books were free; they just weren't desirable.
Curated themed short-fiction collections for Prime members - Warmer (climate fiction), Disorder (social suspense) - featuring acclaimed and bestselling authors.
A content partnership with the New York Public Library and the MTA that put free short stories on the subway's Wi-Fi. Your commute, now with a plot.
A virtual-reality adaptation of literary fiction, made with The New York Times, Sensorium, and Graham Sack. Reading, reassembled inside a headset.
A seven-part animated series pulling the science, ethics, and philosophy out of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, co-produced with Massive Science and ASU's Frankenstein Bicentennial Project.
An event convening technologists, publishers, and writers to prototype the future of books. Because the future of a medium gets built by whoever shows up for it.
If you squint, this is the whole company. Not a genre, not a catalog - a refusal to accept that a story only gets one shape. Most publishers optimize the thing on the page. Plympton keeps asking what the page even is.
Plympton is a hybrid, which is the polite word for "several businesses stapled together by a shared taste." There is the studio side - developing fiction with authors from the idea stage, which is expensive and slow and where the actual editorial value lives. There is the platform side - big distribution partnerships with Amazon, first for Kindle Serials and later curating Amazon Original Stories, which is where the reach and the checks come from.
There is the direct-to-consumer side, most visibly the Rooster subscription app, which tried to turn curated reading into a monthly habit for busy people. There is the sponsored and institutional side - the Subway Library with the NYPL and MTA, the Reanimation! series funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the children's-ebook work built for global translation.
The company raised a seed round and, in 2013, folded in DailyLit, with its founders Susan "Gigi" Danziger and Albert Wenger coming aboard as investors and advisors. It is not, and has never tried to be, a venture rocket ship. It is a small, sharp studio that keeps getting invited to help large partners figure out what readers want next.
Which is a genuinely defensible position. Curation is a point of view. A point of view is a brand. And when Amazon wants a themed collection of short fiction that feels edited rather than assembled, being the studio with taste is a surprisingly durable thing to be.
A literary studio.
Three words doing an enormous amount of work. "Literary" is the standard. "Studio" is the business model. Nobody else in publishing quite says it that way.
Plympton and Amazon Original Stories released Disorder, a second curated collection - short fiction built around social suspense.
Curated Warmer, a collection of climate-change fiction ("cli-fi") for Amazon Original Stories, pairing a literary format with an urgent theme.
Released a virtual-reality adaptation of literary fiction with The New York Times, Sensorium, and Graham Sack - an early, serious attempt at reading inside a headset.
The curated reading app launched for iOS, pairing a contemporary book with a classic every month.
Searches for talks and product demos featuring the founders and their projects. Links open a relevant search on YouTube.