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Gotham Literature
Gotham Literature is a digital publication whose mission is to make high-quality literature accessible for readers and profitable for writers.
We make it easy for busy people to incorporate literature into their lives by curating short-form fiction, poetry, and comics that can be enjoyed in under 5 minutes. This allows our readers to engage with writing in the same bite-sized way they’re accustomed to consuming other forms of digital media, and provides them with a path around the barriers that prevent people from engaging with creative writing more today: the high upfront investment of time and money involved in buying a novel, and the hit-or-miss frustration of scouring user-generated content platforms to find content worth engaging with.
We also aim to offer writers a sustainable way to earn income by providing them with a portion of the subscription revenue that their content generates — we anticipate launching our subscription model in the first half of 2026 after focusing on audience building in 2025.
Gotham Literature was founded in 2024 by Daniel Taylor Wittenberg, who after eight years of working at The New York Times decided to bring his digital audience and subscription growth expertise to the world of literary publishing. Daniel was at The Times as the company grew from 1.2 to 10.4 million digital subscriptions. He optimized marketing tactics for the company’s various audience segments, introduced a personalized paywall model that drove millions of incremental page views and thousands of new subscriptions each month, and experimented endlessly with ways to maximize reader engagement and revenue.
Daniel loves the way good writing can lift you to another place and leave you thinking about your own life differently when you land. He used to love getting lost in books, but found it hard to incorporate literature into his day-to-day life when he started working full time. After many years of viewing this as a great moral failing on his part ("why does picking a book feel so daunting? Why can't I ever finish the ones I've started?") he began to wonder if the difficulty wasn't all his fault — maybe, part of the blame lay with the literary publishing industry's failure to adapt to the way that most people now consume media (such as social, news, music) today: digitally, in bite-sized pieces.
Daniel is seeking a co-founder to serve at Gotham Literature's founding editor-in-chief. This person will be responsible for shaping the editorial vision of the publication. This will include defining a strategy for the types of content we publish, experimenting with the formats we publish content in, developing a roadmap for when content is published, and establishing a process for the timely solicitation and editing of content.
The ideal candidate will have extensive experience soliciting and editing short-form creative content that resonates with broad audiences, a demonstrated ability to rally an editorial team around ambitious publishing goals and deadlines, and an enthusiasm for experimenting with different digital content types and formats to elevate writing. If you're interested in this position, or know someone who you think would be a good fit, please write to daniel.wittenberg@GothamLiterature.nyc.
Gotham Literature is also seeking individual and institutional investors to provide us with the funding that will allow us compensate writers, grow our audience, and cover administrative costs until we launch our subscription model in early 2026. We are a seed-stage, for-profit company who believe strongly that good literature is worth paying for, and that there is a significant revenue opportunity for publishers who successfully bring literary publishing into the rapidly growing world of digital subscriptions. If you would like to be a part of our journey and learn more about our business plan, please reach out at investors@GothamLiterature.nyc.
All other inquiries can be sent to info@GothamLiterature.nyc. We look forward to hearing from you!