The Long Tail

If you’ve been hanging out on the internet for a while, chances are you’ve heard of the Long Tail. This phrase was made popular by Chris Anderson, editor for Wired magazine, back in 2004.

Let’s cover the basics of the Long Tail. Imagine you own a book store. You have enough shelf space for one thousand books. However your supplier has over 10,000 books that you could choose to stock on your shelf. How do you decide which ones to sell?

The answer is simple, if you have the right data. You simply choose the top 1000 books that sell better than the rest. You buy and stock books that sell 100 copies a month, not the ones that sell only 20.

But now imagine you have an online bookstore. Now you can stock an almost infinite number of books. You can sell books that are lesser known, and in fact, even though they don’t sell as much, you might sell more of them simply because there are more of them. In other words, the 9,000 books that only sell a few copies might bring in more money that the 1,000 copies that sell better.

So, what does this have to do with authors? Online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow us to take advantage of this Long Tail philosophy. If you’ve ever gotten a rejection letter in which the editor says they love the book but it’s not marketable, then that is good news. That means your book is prime for the long tail. Get it out there in e-book form. Let people rate it and you will make fans. It may not be a blockbuster, but it’s something. And maybe it does better than folks expect, and you can land a print deal in the end.

Authors who have books out of print should also take advantage of the long tail, especially if your out of print books were only marketed to a limited market. With online retailers you can reach a wider audience and perhaps sell more books that your print copies did.

If you’d like to read more about the long tail, I recommend the Wikipedia article linked above, or the original Wired magazine article, available here.