A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. I spent time mulling over some of these ideas and trying to look specifically at the book industry. Here’s my summarized account of what I think Chris is saying.

Online channels allow customers to pick from a full range of products and services. More choice means the hits sell less because a percentage of the people who would have bought the hit (if it was the only option available) have moved down the tail, discovering products more closely tailored to their needs, personal style, taste, budget, etc.

In order to increase revenues and optimize profits, companies can no long rely on the hits. They need to find ways to engage with customers on their own terms (online, anonymous, search-driven) and expose them to the tail (full range) of products.

How do I think publishers going to do that? By …
– Studying their customers’ behaviour.
– Looking at trends in online purchasing.
– Paying attention to their web stats to understand what their customers are doing online.
– Placing importance (and budget) on online sites that are searchable, filter-friendly, and include recommendations and ranking systems or any tool that allows for further customization or tailoring by the user.

I think The Long Tail is screaming out for all companies to rethink their physical assets and determine what digital components already exist or can be created. If you get past step one, then you can figure out the business model.

In book publishing, we’ve been aware of the long tail for years. We call it backlist. Publishers have historically looked at ways to balance the ratio of sales of frontlist titles (new titles) to backlist titles (titles published 6 months ago or beyond). Even if that split is 40-60, publishers mostly put time and money into selling and promoting the frontlist. I assume the theory is that if you can get the new books going, then they happily carry on without a lot of effort. But what Chris is saying is you could sell a lot more with a little effort.

I suspect that publishers will continue to obsess over the hits, but Chris is pointing out that sales are no longer coming from one channel–independent stores, chain stores, wholesalers, discount stores, online retailers–customers are no longer gathering in one place, “they are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches.” But the one big growth area is the web.

Why? Because customer behaviour is changing. Internet connectivity in Canada is widespread. People have access to cultural content across a broad spectrum. Their attention is sought after by content creators from the mainstream to the fringe to the underground. But what still drives purchases are recommendations from trusted sources, recommendations tailored specifically to one’s needs and interests. The web is perfectly positioned to aid in that search for book recommendations. We can search online for extra information, we can read about the author, maybe hear a podcast, we can send our friends links to books we like, we can write reviews on book sites. We Google, we Yahoo, we MSN, we blog, we email, we browse. It’s a time of infinite choice, and the web is the land of infinite discovery.

The Long Tail is about how technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches, what people do at a niche level, and how to filter and reference and measure success within a niche.

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On a related note, I noticed that Amazon has recently changed the way they generate URLs. Instead of seemingly random numbers, the title and author name are included. One small step towards search engine domination. Put your cursor here and look at the status bar to see “www.amazon.ca/Long-Tail-Chris-Anderson/…”

BOOL. THE END.

To enter to win the package of Stephen King books, tell me in the comments field something interesting you know about Stephen King. Does he staple the sheets of his bed to prevent monster attacks, did you read a great King book and have a favourite quote … anything you find interesting and would like to share. Use a valid email address and live in Canada. Those are the only rules.

You have until Saturday, Oct 21 to enter. I’ll do a random draw on Sunday, contact the winner for his/her mailing address and then mail the prize.

In the beginning Google said that they would not allow the download and printing of books that are no longer protected by copyright [is this true? I need to confirm that], but that changed today. Google is now allowing people to download books whose copyright has expired: Here’s the story on Techcrunch.com.

When the copyright on a book expires, the work enters the public domain, which means that anyone can then take the opportunity to re-publish it, bind it, do whatever. So what’s the big fuss about Google offering up these works for download and print? Nothing. I think it’s great. If the work is in public domain, then they have the opportunity to digitize the works and mine them for revenue. It’s a commercial interest. The more digitized content they have available, the more pages they have to put advertising on, the more ways they have to make money.

The only concern I have is how are they determining when a book’s copyright has expired? What happens if they release it and the copyright hasn’t expired? The owner of the copyright has the right to gain financially from that work. It’s not Google’s turn. And once you’ve released the files online, there really isn’t a way to pull them back.

I suppose copyright law could change, there are certainly those advocating for that. But at the moment it is what it is, so I wonder what the plan is. Likely it will cost Google less to apologize and pay out if they do accidently release a copyrighted work vs. implementing a system to ensure accuracy.

How do you feel about Google?

Penguin Press is celebrating 70 years of pocketbooks. I mentioned in an earlier post that while in Winnipeg I stumbled across a brilliant display of new Penguin pocketbooks. These are tiny pocketbooks, 70 in total, promoting the 70th anniversary.

The one that really caught my eye was Nick Hornby’s Otherwise Pandemonium.

First the cover is brilliant. It’s a video tape making a face. Check out the link to see what I mean. I’m not a huge Hornby fan. I loved About a Boy and High Fidelity but How to Be Good wasn’t … good, ok it wasn’t bad but it wasn’t great.

This little paperback, which cost me $4, was brilliant. Two short stories. One about a boy who buys a video recorder so that he can tape tv. Turns out it doesn’t just record, it projects into the future and he sees the end of the world. This, of course, lets him convince a girl in his band class to have sex with him. It’s very very funny. The other story is about a guy who’s well hung and gets a couple of roles in adult films. A neighbour kindly mentions this to his mother and provides her with the video tape. Again, madness and hilarity ensue.

I read both stories over the course of an amazing Italian dinner. It was worth the $4 and I can’t recommend the book enough. I’m still laughing at some of the scenes.

Last week was a week of presentations. On Thursday and Friday I met with WESTAF. And on Tuesday, I met with the students in the SFU summer workshop in book publishing.

I had an hour to give a presentation on online marketing (a little long to include all my notes, but again I want to post this content for my reference and in case it’s of interest to anyone else). Here we go …

Quote: If you ask most people in publishing what business they are in, theyíll say book publishing or selling books. But you really have to look beyond that, selling books is the end result. What youíre actually involved in is telling stories. People donít just buy books, they buy-into an author, a diet plan, a travel experience, a story. What drives them to buy the book is the promise of mental stimulation, of practical help advice, or cooking tips, of engagement with an author or experience. Thatís what you need to get across online.

In the Writers to Readers Sessions at BookExpo Canada, speaker Michael Cader, who runs Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, said that you have to think of the Web as a platform for everything neat you have to sayónot just about the book, but about the author and the content. The idea is to not focus only on the book, but to move beyond the covers, think about all the associations that might be interesting to a reader. Michaelís example was if you have a book about salmon fishing, put salmon recipes up on your site. Put a Guinness Book of World Recordís stat on the biggest salmon ever measured Ö Put a link to a great short story about fishing, etc. Not to mention an excerpt from the book, and every review you can find. [original post/report on BEC]

Itís kind of a corny idea, but if you step back from it and look at why people buy books and why and how people recommend books to their peers, it makes sense. Number one reason people cite for buying a book is peer recommendation. What is it about the recommendation?

1) it came from a trusted source
2) it was tailored specifically to their interests
3) there was something interesting about the author, the story behind the book, the actual story itself. When you listen to people talking about books and recommending a book to a friend they start with ìwell itís a story about X,î but itís really cool because the author wrote it on napkins in prison, or the story was found in an abandoned suitcase, or I heard the author reading on the radio and she has this great Jamaican accent.

The book is just this cold, physical object. The warmth is the interaction you have with the book or author.

In online marketing and promotion you want find ways to
– Be a trusted source.
– Tailor suggestions to the userís interests
– Indentify the anecdotes, the interesting elements of the story (or story behind the story) that people are likely to pass on or share with friends.

You also want to look at your digital assets and find ways
– to make content PARTICIPATORY, both in its creation and its consumption.
– to make Web pages a place of ENGAGEMENT with your market.
– and to create a VIRAL effect. (The link is the currency of the Web.)

Again weíre in the business of ideas, content and lifestyleónot just books. Books are just the beginning of what weíre selling. And when we talk about content as participatory and website being places for conversation and engagement, what weíre talking about is the basic concept of what users do online and how thatís different than what they did 5 years ago. The buzzword you usually hear at this point is Web 2.0.

The concept of ìWeb 2.0î began with a conference brainstorming session between OíReilly and MediaLive International in 2001 [See O’Reilly, What is Web 2.0]. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and OíReilly VP, noted that far from having crashed, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up regularly. The other thing he noted was that the companies that survived the dotcom crash and the new companies emerging involved: good content, user participation, engagement, a viral effect. Examples include Flickr, delicious, Gmail, Google Adsense, eBay, Wikipedia, BitTorrent; and the buzz words are blogs, long tail, web as platform, user participation.

Why is this important?

Itís important because peopleís attitudes towards the web have change, you want to manage the expectations of your users but you also want to provide them what theyíre expecting.

[Then we looked at the basic steps of an online campaign and some examples. I would have liked to go through setting up an online ad campaign, understanding web stats better, monitoring the blogosphere and working with online media … maybe next year. It was the first year I presented at the summer workshop program and definitely a positive experience but also a learning experience. Thank you Tom Best and SFU.]

This week I was part of a panel discussion and brainstorming session with members of the Vancouver technology community and WESTAF, the Western States Arts Federation.

Quote: From the About Us: WESTAF is a nonprofit arts service organization dedicated to the creative advancement and preservation of the arts. Based in Denver, Colorado, WESTAF fulfills its mission to strengthen the financial, organizational and policy infrastructure of the arts by providing innovative programs and services to artists and arts organizations in the West and nationwide.

WESTAF is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; the state arts agencies of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming; private and corporate foundations; and individuals.

Basically WESTAF is trying to figure out how to better use their existing web properties and technology to support the arts organizations they represent. They have some really interesting tools such as ArtJob Online for job seekers and ArtistsRegister.com. But they also have online tools for helping arts agencies and funding bodies put out electronic calls for submission and online ways to review grant applications and entries.

For privacy reasons I don’t want to post my full presentation notes, but I think some of the basic points are things that all arts organizations and artists could consider. Here’s a summarized version.

Quote: What I notice working with arts agencies and funders is that umbrella arts organizations are good at communicating with their member arts organizations, those organizations are good at communicating and building relationships with the artists they represent, and the artists are good at peer-to-peer networking.

At each level there is a certain amount of promotion of artists and services to the public. But arts organizations are seeing a decrease in audience attendance, in book sales, in season tickets, in arts funding in schoolsówhatever it is.

So somewhere along the line weíre missing the key step, which is getting artists or arts orgs networking not just with other artists but with a fan base (so finding fans, creating a fan base, engaging with them, giving fans tools for word-of-mouth or buzz marketing–basically increasing public awareness and enhancing the value of the arts in the mind of the public).

Sometimes it is easy to see how individual artists can use the web to do this type of social networking, but it’s more difficult to figure out what you as an organization can do.

The challenge is to get arts funders, arts agencies, etc. to understand the importance of online tools and services and how they have an impact on the end result, which is selling more ideas, content, lifestyle.

Itís not about the physical product: books, artwork, season tickets. You sell the physical product by building communities of interest through networked effects. [There was some discussion about this, which also came up in my SFU presentation this week. More on that later.]

The first thing to understand is that the ways people use the web today is different than the ways they were using it five years ago. Remember also the web is only 15 years old. A lot of sites we talk about [Flickr, Digg, delicious–sites launched in the last 1-5 years] might not seem relevant at first glance, but understanding the nature of the web is going to help drive the changes you make to your existing products and to help make decisions about what you want to do next.

Look at the websites that are successful or have a commanding presence: Flickr, delicious, Gmail, Google Adsense, eBay, Wikipedia, BitTorrent; all these sites have things in common: good content, user participation, engagement, a viral effect.

The objective is to get organizations or artists to look at their digital assets and find ways
1) to make content PARTICIPATORY, both in content creation and content consumption.
2) to use the Web to ENGAGE with their target market.
3) And to create a VIRAL effect. Whatever they/you are doing online needs to be cool enough or interesting enough or important enough for people to pass on to their friends or colleagues (most likely in the form of links).

So how do make you (as an arts org) make your existing content participatory? What might that look like? [Here we had a discussion based on some suggestions particular to WESTAF.]

I was really thrilled to be a part of this panel. I enjoy understanding industries that are related to my own and looking a the overall strategy. It was mentally very stimulating and I thank Darren Barefoot for inviting me along.