A quick note on Atavist happenings
You may have seen in the news, via reporting from David Carr, that we’ve recently entered in to a partnership with a new venture called Brightline—the brainchild of Scott Rudin, Frances Coady, and Barry Diller. It’s a big deal for us, and we’re really excited about it. It’s also a bit unconventional, so we just wanted to let those of you who are Atavist readers (of our stories) and/or users (of our software) know what it means for us.
In short, it means we’re going to be doing more. On the publishing side, we’re going to be producing more stories and books—some of which will be entirely our creations, some of which will be entirely Brightline’s creations under the vision of Frances Coady. All of them will appear under the Atavist name. On our side of things, we’ll still be telling the kinds of stories we have been: longform, reported, narrative nonfiction between magazine and book length. We’ll still be paying fees and splitting the royalties with our authors, like always. We’ll still be creating multimedia stories, experimenting with new technology and forms (see our most recent nonfiction comic, by Josh Neufeld and Tori Marlan), and also selling our stories as singles on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and Google.
With our platform, as well, we’re not changing course. We’ll continue working with great publishers and organizations like TED, The Paris Review, and many more to help them produce apps, digital magazines, and ebooks. The individual author version of our software, Atavist Create, is still in closed beta, and we’ve been taking our time to refine it, but we’re grinding the gears towards a wider release of that later this year.
So in sum: This is an investment and a collaboration, with some folks we’re really thrilled to work with, enabling us to do a lot of new things that we think you’ll like.
Thanks for supporting us, we wouldn’t exist without the readers and users who’ve trusted us along the way. Speaking of which, check out our latest story! (Or any of the old ones.)
Evan
