Dave Taylor has a great post on the Long Tail this morning (Chris Anderson’s new bestselling book, and his blog of the same name).
I’m a big believer in a key tenet of the Long Tail — that with the advent of the internet more obscure books, movies, and products can have a meaningful and productive sales history and might become profit centers in their own right, or as Dave puts it, “the inherent implication (is) that as the Internet grows you’ll be able to find more and more obscure information.”
I like obscure, I studied the obscure in college.
But based on my experience as an agent, I know the Long Tail will work best when you also have the “Huge Backlist,” and ideally a “Big Head” to boot. Amazon can make money on the Long Tail, and so can iTunes, or Random House, but it will be harder for Joe Author with the obscure backlist book. Sure, he can see improved sales, but they’re not going to make him rich.
A Huge Backlist has a way of paying for operations — your publishing company will grow as big as your backlist allows — but it’s the Big Head of hits that pays for growth, and your executive bonuses, sales conferences in Florida, and your bestselling author’s million dollar home.
The Long Tail can be a boon to authors who have a steady backlist, a self-published book with a higher profit margin, or some variation of multiple streams of income, and backlist provides critical income for any thriving agency, but I think Dave is right when he says that the real money remains in hits.
And I’m sure that Chris Anderson would also prefer to be in the Big Head.
Talk about putting your finger in every pie, this is straight from the pages of Variety and stolen directly from Publisher’s Lunch –
“Amazon has optioned screen rights to Keith Donohue’s bestselling novel The Stolen Child. Amazon will move to secure a filmmaker and then a studio partner to turn the fantasy into a live-action feature.”
I get it. Big-deal old-time tycoons like Howard Hughes built defense contractors, bought Vegas and made movies.
Big-deal dot-com tycoons like Jeff Bezos build e-tailers, start space travel companies, and… make movies.
I’m just jealous. This is a well-reviewed book published by Nan Talese. I can’t wait to see Amazon make hay as a movie producer. Could be fun. Will they scare DVD producers as much as they do publishers?
Part 3 of Tim’s State of the Computer Book Industry.
Tim suggests that both Pearson and Wiley lost some market share last quarter, but I won’t be surprised if both companies recapture some of that next year, when and if we see a year of blockbusters. Vista for Dummies can change this chart in a hurry all by itself.
Tim gives the nod to “for Dummies” as the largest imprint (per sales volume) and notes O’Reilly has the largest revenue, but I think that’s a little misleading because there are so many disparate brands in the O’Reilly pantheon (One on One, Head First, Missing Manual, In a Nutshell — I’d almost count those as imprints themselves). Also, it’s also unclear to me if the entire Wiley consumer non-dummies branded books (which are under the same publisher/vp) are included in this calculation.
Despite any erosion, Pearson and Wiley remain the largest publishers in this market by far.
You have to admire O’Reilly’s strategy of “co-optition.” O’Reilly has done a great job of “growth by distribution,” picking up partners like Manning, Pragmatic and No Starch, rather than growing by acquisition. And I like Tim’s very public wooing of APress.
Another interesting point to keep in mind, although the numbers here don’t reflect it, is that Pearson and O’Reilly are partners in Safari, and O’Reilly appears increasingly committed to ebooks as well.
With all these various ventures (and conferences too) O’Reilly has plenty of bets placed all over the board. Considering the topsy-turvy environment of the last few years, I have to think that’s a good strategy.
Again, I suggest that all my tech clients read O’Reilly’s latest analysis of the tech book market, Linked here.
Although a retrospective analysis can’t always tell us where we’re going, and it’s already too late to jump into some of these categories, or do so at your peril, this is a useful picture of where we’ve been recently. And it’s notable that this has some strong messages for business book authors as well regarding topics like data warehousing, business intelligence, and web 2.0. It’s at least possible to extrapolate some ideas out beyond the strict tech book market.
Wouldn’t it be great if we saw mainstream publishing periodicals like Publishers Weekly do this sort of graphical and granular analysis of the entire bookstore market? I hope they’re paying attention.
A big congratulations to David Boles and Janna Sweenie on finishing Hand Jive: American Sign Language for Real Life to be published this Fall by Barnes and Noble Books.
Congratulations to Ed Baig on the completion of his first book, Macs for Dummies, to be published by Wiley.
Congratulations to Kevin Blackwood on the publication of Casino Gambling for Dummies. Kevin’s book was co-agented with Venture Literary.
Congratulations to Sue Jenkins, Michele Davis and Jon Phillips on the publication of the Dreamweaver 8 All In One Desk Reference for Dummies.
Thanks for working with me!
Tim O’Reilly has posted his new state of the computer book industry.
Unfortunately, Tim writes “While Q1 was consistently higher than any period since the bust in 2001, and looked like we might be about to break out of the narrow range of the past couple of years, Q2 bumped along at about the same level as last year.”
As always, Tim will follow this post with more analysis in the next day or two.
I still expect a big bump with Office, Vista, CS3 and Leopard, eventually. There was little new software activity in the second quarter, which gives me some cause for hope.
Rumor via publisher’s lunch, and courtesy of engadget. Linked.
They need a bigger screen for sure but this makes sense any way you look at it. If someone is going to make a breakthrough with ebooks, why not expect if from the company with the platform (and store) that’s already selling the largest number digital downloads?
An author team and I just pulled the plug on submitting an awesome proposal that I was sure would sell.
The proposal was extremely well done. The sample chapters, wonderful. The topic (name withheld to protect the innocent) represents a life-changing issue for literally millions of couples in the US alone.
In fact, we had a great run at publishers, and lots of interest with editors pitching to editorial boards throughout the process, but the one element we couldn’t control decided our fate: the bookscan numbers on similar titles just weren’t good enough. As one editor said, “this is a big problem but not a big market.”
In fact, had I repped a book on this topic before I might have known that publishers were at their wits end. Here’s an important health issue with lots of potential readers but for some reasons these folks aren’t buying books.
I’m going to keep this proposal on my desk. Something might change. You never know when a surprise bestseller might re-ignite a category, or a TV show or movie might do the same trick, but for now it’s the most bittersweet moment: we did a great job, but we couldn’t sell the book.
Via c|net, this is kind of cool if you’re an exhibitionist and no-one has picked up your memoir yet, though I’m not sure if it will ever work.
Dandelife is a web 2.0 style timeline generator, but what’s most interesting is that according to the article on TechCrunch, “Users will be able to make their stories available for branding by corporate sponsors bidding for content.”
I’m sort of with the TechCrunch author, Marshall Kirkpatrick, who says “yes we all have a right to monetize our writing and media content online – but renting out chunks of my life story for corporate branding is not something I’m comfortable with.”
But hey, it’s another way to be “famous” and connect your Blog, YouTube and Flickr streams, create your own “reality show,” write and distribute your own memoir, and maybe find corporate backing to boot.
