How ironic! Chris Anderson and his publisher are trying to make his new book a product for mass consumption. While "The Long Tail" explains "Why the future of business is selling less of more," his publisher has ordered three printings (150,000 copies) and the book is currently #15 on Amazon.com's best seller list.
"I can live with that irony," he said in a publication day interview, this morning. "If my book about niches becomes a hit, I can live with that."
Many people have been living with his "Long tail" marketing mantra for almost two years.
In the Dec, 2004. issue of Wired Magazine, as its relatively-new editor in chief, Anderson wrote, "The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream." Over the next 18 months, Anderson fleshed out the idea with blog readers and researchers at Stanford University.
Readers of his Long Tail blog learned that Netflix stocks 60,000 titles and more than 95% are rented at least one each quarter; that the worldwide decline in music sales has been felt far more in the hits than in the niches, and New York magazine explained why the TV audience is no longer passive. 'TV is selling shows to viewers—which, in TV terms, is like saying that the law of gravity is null and void. Everything’s up in the air," the magazine reported.
Listen to a podcast interview with Chris Anderson.
Anderson's publisher, Hyperion, is marketing the book in an old fashioned way: a full page ad on A-13 in The New York Times. And over the past week, old media including the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker as well as new media bloggers such as Anil Dash have said nice things about “The Long Tail.” Anderson, himself, has been anything but reluctant to beat the drums to make his own book about small stuff a big deal. Author signings, blog postings, podcasts, and so on. He wants to be a big success.
"If this works, I'm going to spend the rest of my career talking about long tail marketing," Anderson realized. "The funny thing is that it's kind of what I do anyway. I didn't start the blog to market. I don't like to answer all my e-mails to market. (But) It turns out when it's time to market, they're the right methods."
Anderson started the blog as a research and writing tool, framing it as a collection bin for relevant information. He also began building an audience. Alexa.com reports his blog may reach a few thousand people a week. Some must be “the right people,” who buy books, write about books, and report about technology. They can influence sales. They're the people every author wants to reach.
For tech reporters, "The Long Tail" is a pretty old story. But for "old media", to judge by the attention being paid, it's a new, new thing. "Really, really big changes in our culture take forever (to be recognized),” Anderson said. He cited another author's work, James Surowiecki’s "The Wisdom of Crowds." Anderson said, "It's really just Adam Smith's 'invisible hand.' It takes centuries to understand the full impact of these things.
"All I've done is point at the data we've had come out in the past five years, and this concept of 'infinite shelf space," and given it a name," he said.
Yes, that irony is not lost on me, either. The transformation of the book publishing industry is a recurring example in his book.
I'll be meeting Chris for the first time tomorrow at the NYC event. I'll ask him about that, as he's signing my book :)
If you're looking for a direct marketing application of long tail concepts, check out HitTail. We refer to Chris in our demo, because it actually makes our service possible to understand.
Posted by: Mike Levin of HitTail | Jul 11, 2006 at 15:24