The long tale

     

     I've been reading more of The Decision Book today (this post will tell you about it and the publisher's discount offer), and the part that struck a chord is the section called The Long Tail Model or How the internet is transforming the economy. This interested me because of one of the things we were talking about yesterday, that is, how publishing decisions are driven by an author's sales record. If you read Linda's first comment you'll see that she says one publisher's marketing department turned down her latest book because her sales track record "wasn't dazzling, merely respectable", and Linda goes on to describe the "rave rejections" she got for the book which editors loved but didn't think would make them a lot of money.

    To go back to The Long Tail Model, it claims that on the internet, on sites such as Amazon and Netflix, best-sellers and blockbusters account for only 20% of sales, while the other 80% is from a wide range of 'niche products', as they are termed. While of course a publisher hopes that the book they are bringing out will be the next big thing, if this model is correct, is it not also worth publishing a wide range of titles for which ambitions in terms of sales are lower but still good? The online aspect of this is key because lower overheads mean that a company like Amazon can stock thousands of titles in its warehouses, whereas a high street bookseller, with much smaller premises and higher fixed costs, requires a much larger proportion of its stock to be bestselling in order to earn its space on the shelf.

     With the advent of ebooks - no space constraints at all - the long tail looks like getting even longer as there is scope for more titles at less cost to the publisher. If this is so, why do not publishers, instead of turning down a book which they like and which, in a perfect world, they would publish, just bring it out in e-book form? Maybe this happens already, but I haven't come across it, and certainly not where the big, well-known houses are concerned. Granted, authors can do it themselves and cut out 'the middle man', as we've seen here with Linda, but then they lose whatever marketing boost inclusion on the publisher's list would bring. Either way, it looks as though in due course the tail will be wagging the dog!

Comments

[Sandy]

I was thinking again about how readers might find the e-authors that they will love. To help lead them from one author to another, I was wondering if there is any way to use a web-based image similar to your reading map concept Cornflower?

If there was a big enough data sample, it might be possible to identify possible 'trails'. For example maybe a high proportion of readers who like Peter May, also like Linda Gillard. And negative associations could be represented by road blocks!

[Cornflower]

Brilliant idea, Sandy!

[Dark Puss]

Possibly Parellel Coordinates might be quite a simple graphical way to illustrate this for a small number (tens) of authors. I'll give this some thought, but for more than a few authors you will need a very large sample of contributors to see any significance.

[Sandy]

Yes DP - I wasn't thinking of it as something for the site here - more a centralised marketing idea for the equivalent of iTunes

[Dark Puss]

Ah I see, thank you for the clarification. I will now stop thinking!