10 Jan 2009

kaigou: this is what I do, darling (A2] want a revolution)
revised to remove confusing terminology that had some folks balking.

Dear Author recent post covered a lot, but missed a crucial detail. In talking about the publishing industry's byzantine and neolithic (wow, there's a combination) business model, and especially in comparisons to netflix, must address LIZARDS.

For awhile, the net was all agog over the notion of a 'long tail': at the onset of a new item's introduction, the sales should be pretty high for X amount of time, and then those sales taper off. The longer that tapering lasts, the longer the 'tail' of the sales. If, as [name I can't even recall right this minute and should damnit] first noted, you do the math, you might eventually figure out that a long tail, if stretched long enough, could end up equal to (or at least rivaling?) the original burst of, uhm, roundbody sales.

Pretend you sell 100 units every week in the first six weeks. After that, just to pull random numbers, let's say it drops by 1/2 each week until you get down to the actual tail, where the minimum would be (duh) 1 unit per week. Behind this cut are a lot of business basics, bookstore generalities, and what Borders did that's so epic fail. )

I had meant to talk about the lizard-tail, but I'll do that next -- it just seemed like (or maybe it's my bias) that unless folks understand how the bookstore industry nuts & bolts things, then it wouldn't make sense how to go about lizarding things. Although that's possibly also because I don't have more than a general clue how publishing works, but I do have a grasp on how bookstores work, so I'm going to naturally approach any solutions from the POV of whether it would be help/harm to bookstores.

goto part two
kaigou: this is what I do, darling (W] iguana greeting)
continuation of first part

As [livejournal.com profile] rezendi pointed out in comments to last post, 'long-tail' as 'moneymaker' has apparently been dropped, and as I replied, I find it rather amusing. I think people jumped on it, seeing 'moneymaker' as 'woo hoo more bucks!' when if you look at the example at the start of previous post, one book a week is going to take about, uhm, two years to match what was sold in the first six weeks. Yes, it's a moneymaker... technically. The issue isn't whether it's a get-rich-method, so much as whether it's a consistent seller, which is a far more preferable lizard-tail -- from the bookstore point of view -- than anything else. Authors may go crazy at the idea of selling only a book a week but that "yep, sold another one this week, too," is a bookstore's bread and butter, baby.

Which is to say: I'm going with the notion of a LIZARD, instead. Still same great visual, but without that confusing pop-internet terminology that's giving some folks hives. (Sorry.) For the bookstore version of a lizarding: it's not in a specific single title. It's in all the titles that do not turn over in the space of one month. That's the true lizard [long tail], from a seller's perspective.

Here's my idea of innovation, though it comes from the bookseller side: I'd say, take the dumpy igauna bookstore of the Cerberus ilk, and super-glue it to the library's skeletal chameleon, and then run that result through the internet cloning machine -- now with Netflix commentary. )

Because lizard GOOD.