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. 

Awaiting the future of fiction. (Photo: Plympton, via Instagram)

Still more evidence that Twitter means business about its positioning as a media brand: In an event today at the New York Public Library, head of editorial programming Andrew Fitzgeraldannounced a Twitter Fiction Festival, a wholly virtual event that'll run November 28 to December 2.

The goal, according to Mr. Fitzgerald, is to "push the outward bounds of what people thing of when they think of content on Twitter."

The announcement was made at a panel, in concert with the New Yorker and organized by the serial fictioneers at Plympton, on the future of fiction. (Judging from the tote bags and hashtagged tweets, the crowd was heavy on publishing types.)

Before inviting New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman to the stage to discuss the live-tweeting of Jennifer Egan's "Black Box," Mr. Fitzgerald gave a brief presentation, titled "Twitter is for storytelling." Surely you can guess the theme?

Most of us default to tweets when we think about content on Twitter, but Mr. Fitzgerald wants you to reconsider. He pointed to several examples of experiments that move storytelling beyond the simple 140-character format. There was Teju Cole's seven-part response to Kony 2012, which was essentially an essay. There are characters like @karlthefog, a baleful version of the San Francisco fog, and @MayorEmanuel, which began as a parody account and evolved into a kind of semi-dystopian, parallel-world-skipping science fiction story.

All in all, every day there are over 400 million tweets sent. That amounts to something like 80,000 novels worth of content, daily. (Some of these novels, though, are surely better than others.)

It also makes a nice complement to television programming, he pointed out. He used the illustration of Community, which carried on a kind of parallel Twitterverse plotline, as several characters live-tweeted helping someone move.

More than that, Mr. Fitzgerald argued, Twitter is a "global, realtime broadcast platform in its infancy," and a wide-open frontier for experimentation. He really spun this metaphor out, complete with powerpoint image of the Nebraska frontier and a final call for us to get out there and pioneer some narratives. Twitter wants to "invite people to go out on this frontier and start building some structures--we're asking all of you to go out and stake your claim and begin building the future of storytelling."

And so the festival is an attempt to encourage even more of this. Featured will be a minimum of 10 to 12 stories, though the number might be much larger.  "We think it's important to do this sort of experimentation, to see how far we can go with the tweet and beyond the tweet," he explained.

Submissions open today.

Little Nell, the Bella Swan of her day. (Public domain image via flickr.com/circasassy)

When Amazon flipped the switch on its Serials program last Thursday, it also served as the debut of a new startup: Plympton, founded by journalist Jennifer 8 Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love. The company is contributing three of the eight titles inaugurating the initiative: The Many Lives of Lilith Lane, a paranormal YA mystery; Hacker Mom, dubbed a "mom thriller"; and Love Is Strong as Death, a mystery.

Plympton's founders describe the company as a "literary studio," functioning a little like a publishing house and a little like a movie studio. Their mission? Nothing less than using new technology to  reinvigorate a storytelling form that publishing left for dead decades ago. (Naturally, there's a Kickstarter campaign.)

"What we care about is actually just bringing back this format, because we do think it would be good for literature," Ms. Love told Betabeat. "It's good for writers, it's good for readers, it's good for the state of American literature."

Ms. Love believes that the market has shifted in such a way to open up a space for the form. It's not that the cost of producing a book has suddenly skyrocketed, but publishers are under cost constraints that lead to pruning of their fiction lists. "They'll take risks every now and then on a newbie novelist," but most of the deals go to established writers or sure-thing concepts like vampire romances. "The startup cost of actually publishing a book, for whatever reason--it's more expensive in terms of the risk and what publishers are willing to do," she said.

Back in the 19th century, serial fiction was pretty much the hottest game in town. The story always used to illustrate this fact is that, during the serialization of Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, an unruly crowd of Americans once met a British ship at the docks, demanding to know whether the heroine Nell was alive. Think the Victorian version of Twihards lining up for Breaking Dawn screenings days in advance, and you've got the picture.

The form's ubiquity was due to the economics of publishing in a day and age where manufacturing was far from streamlined. "The reason that serialized fiction was so popular back when it was, in the nineteenth century, was that it made really good economic sense for publishers and for writers," explained Ms. Love. "Books were incredibly expensive to print, and so this was this wonderful way to test the commercial viability of a story and, hopefully, to build an audience before you laid out that expenditure."

Nor did the form fall out of fashion simply because people lost interest, she insisted. Rather, newspapers and magazines shifted so the content simply had no place. "They started gearing more toward reporting the news," de-emphasizing entertainment. She cited the enthusiasm over densely plotted television shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men as evidence of the enduring appeal of the serialized narrative.

"It's actually that space between the episodes, where you're sort of waiting and anticipating and you're speculating, that makes it all feel so much more alive and vivid," she said, adding, "It makes the experience a lot more similar to everyday gossip, which I think is sort of the instinct that makes us love fiction in the first place."

"Serialization becomes this really great way to get writers experimenting again and to be able to work on things that aren't that sure thing," she added.

And the beauty of the modern serialized novel is that, these days, the technology is far more streamlined and convenient. (Frankly, the process sounds simpler than getting the latest episode of Game of Thrones.)Kindle Serials will automatically update with new content, meaning there's no need to meet the boat for the latest installment in The Pickwick Papers.

There's also the matter of monetization, and the simple fact that recurring billing is an attractive proposition for a publisher. As Ms. Lee, Ms. Love's cofounder, told us via email: "The economics for this works because even though it's a modest price point for one episode, you have an audience that comes back again and again because they love the story."

She also pointed out, "Note that all the great powerhouse franchises have been series: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight. There is something compelling about going back into the same universe."

As for what the future looks like, Ms. Love isn't interested in laying out a formula they'll be adhering to--two parts mystery, three parts romance, one part YA, season to taste. She hopes to publish ambitious literary fiction and thinks Plympton's lean business model means they can afford to give it a try: "We can actually take the risks that the big publishing houses can't take right now" she said, offering the example of "very heady books, very complicated novels where you have to remember a list of dozens of characters."

"At the end of the day it always comes down to the same thing--does this piece of fiction feel alive? Does it feel exciting? Do you want to keep reading?"

Installments range in length from 8,000 to 25,000 words. Some will arrive every two weeks, others once a month. At the moment, most of their series run five installments, but Ms. Love expects that to change. "I'm very open to publishing much longer pieces," she said.

This Jane Eyre obsessive will keep her fingers crossed for a sprawling historical novel--perhaps The Secret Diary of Nikola Tesla?