Ms. Lee and Ms. Love. (Photos: Plympton)

Good news for anyone who likes their fiction doled out chapter by chapter, Charles-Dickens style: Today at O'Reilly's TOC Conference (livestream here for the interested) Plympton, the serial fiction studio cofounded by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love, announced that they're "joining forces" with DailyLit, a site founded in 2006 as one of the earliest experiments in digital books. The founders, former Random House exec Susan Danziger and her husband, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, will continue to advise and invest.

"I realized that DailyLit really needed a good shot in the arm," said Ms. Danziger, who'd been working on the project herself in the last few years. "At a certain point, there's only so far you can bring something, and it's the kind of thing that needs a team that's really excited about it." 

The acquisition gives Plympton whole new customer-facing platform to play with, one that'll allow the company to distribute its own content. So when the startup releases its next batch of titles, sometime in June, expect to see them more places than just Amazon. "We think the best thing for authors is to have their work as widely distributed in as many places as possible," explained Ms. Lee. "We are anti-walled garden."

The announcement also hints that they want to "bring the DailyLit experience up-to-date by developing new and engaging ways to give readers more power than ever to read what they want, when and where they want." We sure hope she's hinting at an update to DailyLit's current delivery methods of email and RSS.

There's also the fact that acquiring DailyLit ought to give a little boost to the startup in terms of its customer base. Over the years, Daily Lithas delivered more than 50 million installments to more than 800,000 readers. "We’ve been impressed how DailyLit has created an intimate and direct relationship with readers," wrote Ms. Lee in the announcement. "When Susan sends out the newsletter to hundreds of thousands in the DailyLit audience, people write back personally."

Plympton was launched last year in a particularly splashy moment, as Amazon debuted serial fiction offerings on the Kindle. DailyLit, on the other hand, was originally a passion project of Ms. Danziger and Mr. Wenger, who still codes for fun. In fact, Mr. Wenger built much of the early site while on a getaway in the Adirondacks.

DailyLit started out with just public domain offerings, but as readers requested more and more contemporary titles, Ms. Danziger began cutting deals with several publishers and launched a library of paid books. She eventually scaled back the program, which was perhaps a bit ahead of its time, but Plympton has the option of resurrecting it as the team updates the site.

Ms. Danziger admitted she'd been shopping the site around for the last year or so, and "we had other folks who were interested in bringing DailyLit into the fold," many of them more traditional. "But how can you not work with Jenny?" she added. She cited the example of how Ms. Lee had gotten part of the coding for Plympton done: She told an MIT grad student she'd help him create an OK Cupid profile, including taking the photos herself.*

Speculating on the opportunity for the combined companies, Mr. Wenger said, "I very sincerely believe that whenever you get a transition from the offline world to the online world, the first iteration is going to be a straight-up copy. The most interesting things happen when you get past the straight-up copy." That means companies like Plympton/DailyLit, USV's own investment Wattpad, and even Rap Genius have a chance to really do something interesting.

When Plympton releases its next slate of titles, by the way, one of them will tackle a subject near and dear to Betabeat's cold, withered heart: love in the digital age. We're told WinkPoke will be part riff on the New York Times' "Modern Love" column, part updated "Sex and the City."

*The original version of this article suggested the MIT grad student had already had an OK Cupid profile which Ms. Lee revamped; in fact she helped him create one. We also misstated the name of Plympton's upcoming release, WinkPoke. Betabeat regrets the errors. 

Equity moves everything around me.

Early last month, based on the volatility and vagaries of the public market,  Union Square Ventures' partner Albert Wenger urged startups to go out and get that VC paper "ASAP" while they still could. Well, soon enough, those startups may be able to get it from USV. The Wall Street Journal reports that the firm is talking to its current base of investors about raising another $150 to $200 million fund to invest in tech startups that could close as early as the end of the year.

One could say that USV partners like Fred Wilson took Mr. Wenger's advice about raising money before the "startup winter" freezes the capital markets, except that USV, which was an early investor in Twitter, Zynga, Foursquare, Tumblr, and more recently 10gen and Turntable.fm, is in a different league. While some VCs have had a tough time raising recently, an anonymous investor told the Journal,

"[USV] just have to call their [investors], and that's all the marketing that they have to do. Everyone wants in."

"Union Square is such a hard fund to get into," said one venture investor who has been trying to gain access to the firm for the last seven years. "I have their private-placement memorandum from 2004 on my desk to remind of the one that got away."

Catch her while you can . . .

While the rest of the tech scene frets over easy-money and inflated valuations, Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wegner is reading the public market tea leaves and seeing something different. In a post on his Tumblr today entitled, "If You Need to Raise Money, Get Your Financing Done ASAP," Mr. Wenger points out that even early stage companies nowhere near an IPO are still beholden to the vagaries of the public market, making the argument that the time is nigh to grab the cash. Forget micro, think marco.

"While we are still well off the 52-week lows this shakiness in the markets has very real reasons: Europe has been a mess for a while and the US is rapidly becoming one," writes Mr. Wenger. Then, he explains why even Series A start-ups should care:

"At first blush it makes little sense for early and even growth stage company financings to be driven by the cycle in the public markets.  After all, if you are doing a Series A, B or even C financing it is usually with the expectation that the company will be private for at least another 2-5 years and possibly longer.  So the things that should matter are your expectations about the company’s growth prospects and valuations in the future.  Unfortunately, as it turns out people’s expectations about both of these are largely driven by current market performance. And that actually turns out to be fairly rational when you don’t see path towards how or why things should get better."

While acknowledging that there are no certainties, Mr. Wenger predicted that "the probability of a dip that could be as big as 2008 or even bigger has gone up tremendously in the last few months." His advice? "If you are running a company that needs to do a venture round soon, I highly recommend that you get it done ASAP as opposed to optimizing for price." Mark Birch, another NY tech investor, put it more threateningly in the comments: "My advice, raise now or else..."