The Long Tail
Constance July 3rd, 2006
Something writers need to factor in for their publishing careers these days:Â
Going Long: In the new “long tail†marketplace, has the blockbuster met its match? by JOHN CASSIDY in the current New Yorker.
“Even an industry as old-school as book publishing exhibits long-tail behavior. In 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies. And yet these scattered individual purchases add up to a surprisingly large market, especially at online booksellers. At Amazon.com, for example, about a quarter of all book sales come from outside the site’s top-one-hundred-thousand best-sellers. “What’s truly amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it,†Anderson writes. “Again, if you combine enough of the non-hits, you’ve actually established a market that rivals the hits.—
Love, C.
Is the Long Tail anyting new in publishing? Didn’t we used to call that “the midlist”?
Isaac Asimov used to write that he enjoyed the peculiar kind of celebrity he had. On the one hand, he could go to a science-fiction conventin and be mobbed by fans. But most of the time he could just walk down the street, anonymous and unknown, left alone.
I wrote about the Long Tail in Feb. 2005, on TechWeb. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing a couple longish excerpts from the article here:
[The Long Tail contains] everything that isn’t a bestseller. It’s the TV shows, soft drinks, and consumer products with small, but devoted, followings.
Each of those niche products generates trivial sales compared with any individual bestselling product. But the total market share of all niche products, taken together, is as big as, or bigger than, the market share of the few big hits. The long tail stretches potentially endlessly to the right.
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The Long Tail is nothing new, and it’s always been enabled by the best technology of the day. The first department stores opened in the mid-19th century, providing customers with a broad selection of products, shipped to the store by the new technology of railroads. The first true supermarket was King Kullen, opened in 1930, in New York. Founder Michael Cullen summed up the philosophy of the Long Tail with his six-word slogan: “Pile it high. Sell it low.”
Much later, when direct marketing took off in the 1980s, it was driven by the availability of cheap shipping, fax technology and phone banks for customers to conveniently send in orders, and general-purpose credit cards like Visa and MasterCard, which enabled consumers to pay for catalog purchases cheaply.
The Long Tail has been entwined with the history of the Internet from the very beginning. Longtime followers of e-commerce will remember a time back in 1994 when it seemed like there was a lot of hype about e-commerce, but only two merchants actually on the Internet selling stuff. And they both sold niche products: HotHotHot.com, which sells hot sauce, and the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. You could get anything you wanted on the Internet, so long as what you wanted was hot sauce or a personalized teddy bear.
Two of the biggest successes on the Internet made their bones in the Long Tail, selling niche products: eBay, which sells niche products including collectible lunchboxes,1960s-era toys, and lamps made from Popsicle sticks.
Google is a more recent success story of the Long Tail. It has built its business on handling obscure searches well. The most popular search terms on Google last year included “Britney Spears,” “Paris Hilton,” and “Christina Aguilera.” Any decent search engine will give you plenty of good results on those search terms. But how many will give you good results on, say, Etruscan pottery? Google will, and that’s key to Google’s ultimate success.
We base our search-engine loyalty not on who does the best with the easy searches, but with the obscure ones. We all make obscure searches, looking up medical conditions, niche products, and obscure facts — it’s just that we all make different obscure searches. That’s what makes them obscure.
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The Long Tail is also a key reason for the success of the original Napster and other illegal file-sharing services. Sure, it was nice that the stuff you got on those services was free, but people who’ve shelled out $1,000 for a PC and $50/mo. for a broadband Internet connection aren’t going to quiver at paying a little bit more for content. The key to the success of Napster — and follow-up file-sharing services — is the selection. Most of the services carry the popular music (and, later, video), but the best services are the ones that offer obscure media, media that you simply can’t find elsewhere. Legal music download services are struggling to catch up.
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The roots of the Long Tail are deep, but the trend is causing social change. We’re no longer in a mass-produced society, where everybody wears the same clothes, listens to the same music, and watches the same three TV networks. We’re seeing the end of mass culture.
That’s what proponents of the Long Tail say. But is it true? Throughout the 20th Century, we saw distribution costs going down. This should have resulted in a proliferation of small businesses, but the opposite happened: domination of media by big companies, domination of the suburban landscape by big corporate franchises. Every mall in America has the same darn stores in it, every highway has a Denny’s, McDonald’s, and KFC. Every town has a couple of hundred movie screens in it, but they’re all showing one of the same dozen or so movies.
Cable TV offers us hundreds of channels, but they all seem to be showing the same programs. Half of them are showing cop procedurals, and half of those are “Law and Order” reruns.
So will the 21st Century really see the end to mass-market culture? Or will it just bring us more of the same uniformity: more Starbucks, more Outback Steakhouses, more reality TV, more bare-midriffed girl pop stars?
The article does a good job of critiquing, as you quoted, weaknesses in Anderson’s argument.
However, it is still something for writers to be considering.
In my field ‘the ‘long tail,’ concept has been around for a long time now — before Anderson picked it up –(library management) and has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘midlist.’ What it has to do with is methods to keep the books that are not new publications, in fact very far from new, to continue to circulate.
Which, granted, is good for writers.
But librarians are also concerned mostly with non-fiction works, and often works written by authors and scholars who are now dead.
Love, C.
This phenomenon may be good for online booksellers, and for buyers, but I don’t see it doing much good for anyone else – not authors, certainly, and not B&M booksellers who can’t stock at that depth.
How is it not good for authors?
It is not good for authors to sell no more than 99 copies of their book.
Thanks, Constance and Mitch.
I’m not sure what to make of any of this, but it’s interesting.
Lois, it’s better for authors to sell 99 copies of their book than none at all.
No, I don’t think so.
A book that is never published at all may one day be printed and sell 1000s of copies, but book that sells 99 copies is nothing but a stench of failure in the nostrils of the universe.
This, I know very well.
And what is definitely not good for authors is a system in which publishers/booksellers flourish and profit by selling 5 copies each of 100,000 titles. They have no particular incentive to sell any more of any given title, they supply no promotion, no marketing, no push behind any given title; the books are merely spores on the wind.
This, also, I know very well.
Ah… but doesn’t it depend which 99 people you sell the book to? If one of those 99 is Tim Burton and he chooses to make a feature film of your book, then that’s good.
So I’m being a little glib here. But there are certainly directors that like to find the diamonds in the rough. I don’t remember there being any eight-figure auctions for the properties behind Alexander Payne’s films (Election, Sideways, About Schmidt, etc.).
And if you win the lottery, you can buy the publishing company and the film studio, with it. Why think small???
Lois, I’m beginning to suspect you’re a “glass is half empty” kinduva gal.
What “half”?
My glass is dry, with bitter salts coating the bottom.
What creeps me out is that every mall in Great Britain has most of the same stores in it, too. The rest of the stores in each mall are the same British ones, with Marx and Spencer sure to be anchoring one end.
I finally had a chance to read the New Yorker article. I couldn’t find it in any copy of the New Yorker I had, and I didn’t want to read it online, so I printed it out. How 20th Century of me.
The article makes a couple of points that raise questions:
- It specifically addresses the midlist–and says that Long Tail retail is bad for the midlist. It helps bestsellers and helps niche products, but hurts midlist products. I’m not sure how the author comes to that conclusion; it doesn’t make sense to me.
- The author also notes that the Long Tail might permit an explosion of products to be sold, but they’ll likely be sold throug a diminishing number of channels. “Diminishing number” = (IIRC) Three: Amazon.com, eBay, and iTunes. I see that as a mixed blessing myself–Amazon.com, eBay and iTunes are providing infrastructure, eliminating the need for the small businessperson to hassle with setting up payment processing, Web sites, and all that stuff. (The small businessperson still has to handle marketing.) Where things get dangerous is when those companies start to flex their muscles and decide what’s suitable for sale, and what isn’t.
As trade publishers are doing one heck of a job not selling novels already … and are bottlenecking the process with such small numbers of them. We have what? 6 major trade publishers in the U.S.? All of them owned by Europeans? Something like that? How many publishers of sf/f? How many editors?
Which makes it essential to stay apprised to what is going on, to figure out how or if you can make it work for you and your individual skill sets. Which is why I posted the news of home audio book recording, for instance. Not for everyone or even most everyones. But for someone, it could be their way into making a career.
Love, C.
I thought that, judging by the title, the “long tail” was a process whereby a book continued to sell by dribs and drabs long after its initial release. Those 99 copies were six or seven years after the book had already sold tens of thousands of copies.
Certainly this is a benefit and not a problem of the system, but as I read the article, it was referring more to another phenomenon – the marketing of “niche” and obscure items that never could have found any market at all under the old bookselling system.