Hugh Howey, for example, is having great success with his run of interrelated stories called Wool. The first book, a 60+ page read, has made the Top 5 Kindle sales for Science Fiction and garnered nearly 100 5 Star reviews at Amazon. This is really quite amazing given that the story is 99 cents and many "bargain" shoppers (this is my bias speaking) don't appreciate a bargain read.
Some have mentioned that Howey's "books" are quite short. Well, of course, they are novellas. If you read the story description of Wool 1, 2, 3, and 4, you'll note that these are self-contained stories that happen to follow a natural story arc. Granted, most end with a cliff-hanger that almost forces you to buy the next in the series. But as Howey points out on his blog, if you spend $3.96 on all four books you'll have purchased the equivalent of a 100,000 word novel. A bargain by any standard.
Evidently, Howey's fans are happy with the agreement as they are clamoring for a fifth story in the series (which is clocking in at the short novel length of just under 60,000 words). According to Howey, this book will be priced higher, and rightly so. Price points are still in flux out here in the wild, wild west of indie publishing, but there is a general sense that short stories start at 99 cents, novellas are $2.99 or so, and full length novels begin at $4.99 and go up from there. Time will tell if these price points remain.
Howey isn't the only one tapping into readers' desires for an ongoing series of well told tales. Grafton will have 26 of them soon enough. Evanovich has no end in sight. These are full blown novels, of course, but the principle applies. In this new digital era I believe that shorter novels (and serial novellas) will become common once again (as they were during the Golden Age of SF).
But every era has examples of this trend. In 1996 Stephen King released six 100 page stories that together were titled The Green Mile. Charles Dickens (a few years before King ;) wrote most of his epics as episodic tales that appeared in the magazines of his day. You get the picture. It will be fun to see what actually pans out this time around. But for what it's worth, my take is that we're at the beginning of another resurgence and, as a writer, I'm looking forward to going along for the ride.
