Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Kindle Singles store, according to its editor David Blum, is “like a bookstore where the manager also edits the books.” Blum is that manager-editor, and under his guidance the store has grown to feature nearly 400 works since launching in January 2011. When the store went live, its mission was to publish the kind of long-form journalism that has become harder to find as more magazines have shuttered and those still standing allocate fewer pages to in-depth pieces.

Since the Singles program started, it has gained enough respect to attract major names—among the many heavy hitters who’ve released Singles are Christopher Hitchens and Stephen King—and to delve into fiction.

Blum, a veteran of alternative weeklies—he worked at both the Village Voice and the New York Press, during the papers’ headier days—has gained a fair amount of attention since the store took off. In an April profile in the New York Times, Leslie Kaufman wrote that he has “transformed himself from doctor of the dying to midwife of the up-and-coming,” becoming “a man whom authors want to court.”...