A New Platform for Serialized Work: Tapas Media

Chang Kim of Tapas Media
Chang Kim, Tapas Media

For years, serialization has been discussed as a significant area of opportunity for reading and publishing in the digital age. (And note to the sticklers out there: I’m using the terms serial and serialization interchangeably to refer to any situation where content is parceled out in small bites and delivered on a specific schedule, whether the content is finished or in progress.)

Wattpad, one of the darlings of the digital writing and publishing community, operates on a serial publishing model, and Amazon has a serials program as well. (Read my reported feature on the serialization trend, as it stood in 2014.)

It has been challenging for both established publishers and indie authors to pursue serialization models because it’s difficult to publish on or profit from them through the existing tools. Wattpad is entirely free for everyone; Amazon’s serial program is part of its formal publishing operations and closed to outsiders.

A new startup launching this month hopes to offer a viable business model and distribution platform for authors and publishers to profit from serialization. Tapas Media is an app-based publishing platform that helps anyone publish content specifically for mobile devices, distribute it widely (outside of existing retail channels), and monetize it.

On the reader-facing side, Tapas offers bite-sized stories and the ability to try any story free before purchasing or “unlocking” installments. To unlock new installments, a reader might invite friends to read, watch ads, complete some other offer, or simply wait. (The founders are calling it “Candy Crush meets books.”)

Tapas expects to open to all authors and is working on attracting traditional publishers to the service. Recently, Tapas Media CEO Chang Kim made an appearance at Digital Book World in New York City, discussing Tapas as part of the Publishers Launch Pad panel. Around that time, he took a few minutes out of a busy week to answer a few questions about Tapas.


Your company hopes to reach a readership that doesn’t buy books. Would you further describe who this readership is or who will be using Tapas? The conventional marketing wisdom for authors usually advocates, “Target people who actively buy in your genre, go where they go” so it’s against the grain for many authors to try and target non-book readers.

We’re not actively un-targeting current book readers; they’re very much invited to check out Tapas! We just believe there are a lot more people out there who may not be reading books today, but spend a lot of time on mobile and would enjoy great stories if those are presented to them on the device they carry always. ​

A​s a similar example, when casual mobile games first came out, they weren’t necessarily targeted for hardcore gamers or tried to convert them over. These were easy, casual games everybody could enjoy. This approach led to a vastly expanded market.

This is the kind of approach we would like to take for books​—provide great stories that anyone, currently a reader or ​not​, can enjoy, with a low barrier of entry.

Given that so much digital content is available for free—e.g., through Wattpad and countless other apps and websites—how will Tapas persuade people to pay to read?

We believe the proliferation of free content does not mean all content should be free. There’s still salable, professionally created content that’s distinguished from amateur content—just like there are real movies, and then there are YouTube videos of dogs skateboarding.

If the stories are good, there are always people who are willing to pay. Often the problem lies with the payment system. If the payment process is too cumbersome, customers’ willingness to pay quickly diminishes​ (think about the music industry). So it may not be about persuading users to pay, it may be about making the payment process really easy and frictionless.

The payment process can be also more granular. ​​Currently the book payment model ​is very simple and binary; users​ are​ asked to pay $13.99 (or whatever the book price is​) for the entire book. That’s like when the music industry only offered one purchase option—buy ​the ​whole CD.

Can ​we offer a more granular payment option for books? That was the promise of micropayment several years ago​, but it never caught on, mostly because it was deployed on the web and on the web nobody pays for content. But if you look at the mobile gaming industry, they have figured out the micropayment model really ​well, in the form of “virtual freemium.” Users buy coins through in-app purchase (which is the de facto way of payment on mobile that a lot of people are already accustomed to), and with coins, they buy small items without having to pay money every single time.

​We believe this model could work really well for ​mobile books too, if the system is smartly designed.

Let’s say an author decides to use Tapas. What are some of the best practices for using your platform in a way that will lead to engaged readers and hopefully long-term fans? What can authors do to make their work more visible and appealing on the platform, if anything?

Tapas is all about bite-sized stories ​that can be enjoyed on mobile. The way people read content on
​mobile is quite different—it’s ​really about ​those 5 minutes ​of time, such as ​when you’re in line or waiting for the train.

Write serial stories in small chapters, each chapter with its ​own ​mini-story arc, so it can ​stand on its own, while also providing enough cliffhanger to make ​the ​readers want to read the next story. That’s ​the right formula for Tapas, we think.

Also, try to capture the audience from the get-go. ​Unless you get the audience hooked early on, even if there’s a killer plot ​change ​coming up ​soon, readers may not be around ​anymore by that ​​time.

Can you share an example or case study of an author or creator using your platform to good effect?

We won’t name a name, because it’s not been announced yet, but there’s a household-name bestseller writer who really likes Tapas and is ​planning to publish on ​Tapas soon. In that author’s case, we’re discussing reviving an old title and remaking it to better fit the Tapas format—mobile friendly, short bite-sized chapters, and so on.

We’re really excited about that idea, and I think in general it would be really interesting to revive old titles that are not printing any more or otherwise not easily available today, but can be ​republished and ​ re-discovered by young mobile users who simply ​didn’t have a chance to ​get exposed to the story before.

Mobile reading is believed to be more prevalent in Asia than in the United States. Why do you think this is?

Mobile reading might have caught on in Asia ​first (e.g., cell phone novels in the 2000’s​)​, but the US has pretty much caught up and ​has enormous potential. Stats show that Americans now spend more time on their mobile devices than on any other devices, including TV.

Some people say that Americans don’t take public transportation as much and as a result there’s less mobile reading in America. But you don’t use your phone only when you commute; your phone is now a computer which you carry literally all the time. Mobile is a global phenomena and the US is no exception; we expect mobile reading will become increasingly more popular in the US market.


Find out more at the Tapas website, or follow news on their Tumblr.

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Nate Hoffelder, editor of The Digital Reader

I covered this story a couple days ago. I have a bunch of reasons why I think this won’t work, the first being that the ebook market and game market are driven by different forces.

A reader posted an even better argument in the comment section:

Freemium games are designed and altered on the fly to offer content appealing to two populations: the avid little fish, who play frequently and recruit other players; and the big fish, who spend money. The big fish are spending money for the fun of playing in an environment with lots of little fish. Now imagine the publishing dystopia of books being written dynamically to appeal to those populations. I think it could be summed up as “The sex lives of famous people.”

That is not at all what Tapas is proposing, I know, but what the company is saying is that a cargo-cult copy of the game market freemium model will work in ebooks. When you look past the cargo cult, and look at what’s behind the model, it raises questions whether this will work for ebooks.

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[…] For years, serialization has been discussed as a significant area of opportunity for reading and publishing in the digital age. (And note to the sticklers out there: I’m using the terms serial and serialization interchangeably to refer to any situation where content is parceled out in small bites and delivered on a specific schedule, whether the …  […]

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[…] Sourced through Scoop.it from: janefriedman.com […]

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[…] [Tapas Media] A New Platform for Serialized Work: Tapas Media […]

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[…] at the moment, I thought I’d explore a new mobile reading app that I learned about via Jane Friedman’s blog.  Tapas is a San Francisco-based media company that publishes “bite-sized content” via […]

Felipe Adan Lerma

Getting ready to release the middle installment of my 37 segment serial run this coming Friday, I was esp interested in reading this article.

And it’s definitely encouraging to see more thought and more effort into taking advantage of the benefits of a TV series-like story, or even early 1800s serial fiction, via today’s modern means of reading, particularly mobile devices.

What surprised me once again, though I should be used to it, was the complete disregard of what I perceived as the main enabler of my being able to even try my first serial fiction work, Kindle Unlimited. Joe Konrath recently mentioned on his blog that KU now has more readers than most if not all the other reading platforms combined. And being accessible via mobile devices is not an adverse issue for KU. And the subscription price eliminates most if not all the problems of a pay model using other platforms.

Plus, having released episodic books in my ongoing work since December 25 of last year, nearly four months ago, and having 4 more months to go, I’ve come to an appreciation of factors of value to me as a writer I wasn’t fully aware of before – the benefits of having time to release excerpts and updates.

With more on-going time, I’ve also been able to continue to choose and include my own original location set images for the story. Being able to have story appropriate images that also reflect my own experiences is a big boost even on phone-size devices.

With more time, I’ve discovered I can begin to also produce short YouTube author-read excerpts.

Text excerpts, author audios, and images, are benefits a writer can contribute to readers.

That’s where I think the real story regarding serial fiction is.

Debating the possibilities of paying for installments via digital coins, or accessing first chapters free, while ignoring Kindle Unlimited, is all ignoring the benefits, to writers and readers alike, where content creators have time and self-imposed deadlines to create the best content possible.

For me, already using my phone to read and write, and already functioning easily in KU, those content benefits are where the real revolution begins.

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[…] New platform fos serialized work: Tapas Media […]

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[…] A new platform for serialized work. […]

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[…] you’re searching for new outlets for your book, Jane Freidman discusses a new platform for serials, Tapas Media, and Mark Lund explains the 2 paths to getting your book made into a […]