Elizabeth Freeman wrote in email: “I listen to NPR’s On The Media regularly (as a podcast) and the June 30th episode had two interesting segments, one with Clive Thompson of Wired discussing the long tail and self publishing called “Turning the Page” and another about John Shors creating his own word of mouth buzz for his book by showing up in person to book clubs featuring his book, and answering questions in person. Both are really interesting (although definitely the first is nothing new to you, it does cite a study that Lulu.com did about the life expectancy of best sellers).
Beth’s right. The Lulu study is very interesting. They discovered that “The life-expectancy of a bestselling novel has halved within the last decade…. It has fallen to barely a seventh of its level 40 years ago…. The average number of weeks that a new No. 1 bestseller stayed top of the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List has fallen from 5.5 in the 1990s, 14 in the 1970s and 22 in the 1960s to barely a fortnight last year — according to the study of the half-century from 1956-2005. In the 1960s, fewer than three novels reached No. 1 in an average year; last year, 23 did.”
This is the converse of the Long Tail. In the face of a plethora of media choices, the “Short Head” is getting shorter. We see this in our own segment of the business. The #1 computer book bestseller today sells a fraction of the number of copies that it sold a decade ago. This is partly due to asymmetric competition from information available on the net, partly due to the increasing maturation of the industry (no one sells many books on how to repair cars any more either), partly due to cutbacks by the retail channel, but it is also partly due to the increase in choice.
There’s a closely related and very insightful New Yorker review of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The article starts with a similar assertion to the one in the Lulu study, namely that none of the top 25 albums of all time were published after 2000, and only three of the top 100. But it later points out that this assertion breaks down badly with regard to movies, where seven of the top ten all time bestselling movies have come out since 2000!
The article also points out that “The long tail has meant that online commerce is being dominated by just a few businesses—mega-sites that can house those long tails….The successful long-tail aggregators can pretty much be counted on the fingers of one hand. Although the online economy has existed for only a decade, businesses like these—and you can add Google and Yahoo—have already established seemingly impregnable positions. If you’re a typical Internet user, when you need to find information you go to Google; when you’re looking for a book or a CD, you go to Amazon; when you want a new golf club, you go to eBay; when you want to download a song, you go to iTunes….Has the New Economy really moved past the familiar “winner take all” dynamic? That depends on whether you’re looking at the long tail—or at who’s wagging it.” (See my 2001 essay, Piracy is Progressive Taxation, for an analysis of why media industries always seem to take this shape.)