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kaigoucontinuation of first part
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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.
Lizard, you say? Here, for reference:
(I re-ran the numbers of the previous calculations, but using actual recalled #s from my own store, and it falls within roughly the same proportions, so I'm suspecting the round numbers here aren't all that far off.)
I don't recall every having anyone tell me, or even imply, that there was an equation for which books go and which stay, each month when considering returns. (Keep in mind we also had more time to return, which today's booksellers don't have.) But in general, it went something like this. If there are, say, 10,000 titles in the bookstore, then 1,000 titles sold -- reorder these copies, and hope they sell again! That kind of "this sold, PING, system says reorder automatically," that was a usual thing. Most bookstores do that, without any thought at all.
That leaves 9,000 titles that didn't sell, though. If you're on a 90-day rotation for book returns, that means -- and we're pretending here that you're really really on the ball with monthly ordering limits and tracking return due-dates, which scarily some bookstores actually are -- that in one month you could be turning over approximately 3,000 titles.
(Let's take a moment of silence for all those overworked bookstore employees who must go through every single shelf with list in hand and pull those books to put on a cart, pack them up -- and ship at bookstore's expense, did I mention that? -- and send them back. Sigh. I hated that part the most, of anything. It's tedious, and depressing.)
The problem is that the 1,000 titles you're selling monthly... aren't always the same books. Oh, if they were, wouldn't that make things easy! Just don't freaking bother with the other 9,000 titles. The problem is that on average, I found, maybe 5% of those titles were consistent sellers and the rest? Different, every single month. Oh does that make reordering and ordering HARD, or what.
There are lots of tricks booksellers learn, but one of the most useful is that of patterns. Look, we sold six books on tai chi this month -- while I rack my brains for who bought them, did we talk? is there a new instructor in town? were they one-time or a regular interest, oh, crap! -- and we also sold nine books on this and five on that. Okay, let's order six more books on tai chi but by different authors, and see if we can re-snag the original purchasers with more on the same topic.
It works. It works really well. It works especially well when you learn faces (if not names) and someone's semi-regular, so you can say, "hey, I remember you were in here, and bought six books on tai chi, and we've got some new ones in, and I thought of you and ordered them." (I think part of the works-well is because face it, everyone likes to be remembered, too.) I could always sell at least two or three of the titles, if not all of them, doing it that way. That's a way of following a trend, with one person as an example. When you get into larger numbers, it's harder to personalize, but it's still the same thing.
This is also why there are currently a bazillion freaking urban fantasy books out there with similar titles, with vampires, with werewolves, all starring chicks with gun/sword/knife. It's why I don't really blame publishers for playing that game, because I did it myself: you bought six other books on this, here are six more you've not seen, but they're on a topic we already know you like. (Amazon's "you may also like" is just a fancy equation-based version of what I did every freaking day in the shop, okay, and on a million-person scale not a thousand-person scale but HEY technicalities.)
ALRIGHTY then. So first, the 10% books that sell are, mostly, unpredictable. Maybe half is unpredictable and half are repeats (same title) or extensions (same-topic-different-title). If there's a really large regular crowd buying, that repeat/extension proportion is going to get really high; if it's a walk-in crowd like at a mall or some other non-community-grounded kind of distanced bookstore, the repeat part may increase due to constant flux of new eyeballs but the extension part will drop, with the bulk being unpredictable still because the constantly-new-eyeballs are, themselves, unpredictable having no existing relationship with the store.
What does all that mean? It means if you know you've got to sell 1,000 books in one month, roughly, that you can figure maybe 250 or so of those books are as close to sure things as possible: best-sellers, regular favorites, series titles, that kind of thing. These titles sell consistently, and these titles certain people/groups will buy because they want anything on that topic. The other 750 books you've got to push? Well, uhm... put up list on wall! Throw darts at it! That's possibly as good a predictor as anything else.
And that means you need as many books as possible on the shelves, to make sure that of all the potential sales, the actual sales reaches to 750, more if the repeat/extension share falls for any reason. In other words, publishers and distributors may be doing their best to amputate the lizard-tail (with the warehouse issues being a big part of that attitude, admittedly), but the lizard's tail IS, potentially, what keeps a bookstore afloat.
You can see how that slams right up against the push, in the past decade or two, to focus on two things: one, turn those puppies over as fast as possible (even if you don't go so far as intentional, malicious churning like Borders did, there's still some level of churn if you pay at 90 but have to return by 90 as well). Or two, focus on the repeat-sales and extension-sales and try to amp those up to make the 10% break-point, and anything else is gravy.
That's where the Pareto model comes in, that 20% carries 80%. Now, I've got a basic idea of how that works in publishing (and find myself constantly amused and dismayed by what seems to me to be a fundamentally flawed business model), but in bookstores, it's pretty apt and there's not really anything you can do about it. If you order 1,000 books and 200 of these are Rowling's latest, and you know those are going to sell, then... yeah. 20% of your order is effectively paying for the other 80% -- and if any of the rest sells, it's gravy. (Or it's 25% and 75%, or 10/90, whatever, but in general, there will be a few books that just leap off the shelves, and those repeat sales in a very short period of time are going to boost everything, enough to carry along all those other titles on the shelves that are not selling quite so hot-cakey.)
Until the internet came around, the only way to get backlisted books was to order from the warehouse (also possible until the internet, since internet arrived in strength right about when the law changed, anyway), or from a booksearcher. Otherwise, what was in the bookstore was what you could get, or you'd mail-order from someone. When you think about the number of books at the library -- thousands and thousands, and all free! -- compared to the average bookstore, you can see how bookstores had really short tails, everything else being equal. Add in internet + law change, and that lizard-tail just got whacked off.
The problem is the monopoly-effect of having B&N + Borders + Walmart (whom I shall simply call Cerberus from now on) plus the publishers, and all with this emphasis on the "next sure thing" -- that is, the 20% that's hoped to carry the other 80%. Instead of seeing the 80% as a boost to the 20%, they started to see it as a drag. The midlist authors who sit along the lizard-tail (and I use this almost entirely in bookstore perspective meaning), get chopped off rather than considered part of the chameleon's leverage.
I mean, that's really what it is: a chameleon has such speed and balance due to that long tail, being able to counter-balance as it whips around curves. The bulk of its weight may be in the body, with the Rowlings and Browns of this world churning out definite bestsellers and whomping the 20% baseline, but the 80% is where the market finds flexibility, with a variety that allows it to answer and be ready for new trends, by having those topics, too.
A major bookstore, of the Cerberus ilk, is a big fat iguana with a stumpy tail. If you're looking for something in that main 20% area, you're all set. If you wanted something a little different to a lot different you're... probably out of luck. Or you'll find the same "little bit different" title you can find in all the other Cerberus-bookstores. Oh, come on, you cry, there are eighty books on this topic on Amazon, why do I only find the same one by the same author in every bookstore? Why doesn't anyone carry any of the others?
(Simple: because when you don't know what in that 80% will sell, you have to spread it as thin as possible, although this assumes we're not talking about a niche bookstore like "mysteries only" or "SFF books" and whatnot. Keep in mind also that when I say 80%, that doesn't automatically mean copies in total; in fact, it may be that the 20% of titles translates to 50% of copies, especially when you get into blockbusters like Rowling where people expect a table piled high enough to tower over the average child... which again cuts further just how many copies of those 80% of titles the bookstore can manage.)
A library, on the other hand, is a very scrawny chameleon. There may sometimes be two or three copies of really really popular books, but eventually those extra copies get turned over into every library's booksale. The library's long tail, however, is about EIGHT MILES LONG. Title upon title upon title in every imaginable category and if a book doesn't "sell", only the most pressed-for-space libraries will turn over the book for sales. One of my favorite libraries ever was the city library in Washington DC, which rated a book ready for its bookstore when it had not been checked out in at least ten years. Imagine the length of that tail!
So when I say to take the library route, this is my idea of innovation, okay? Your mileage may vary, but it's just what popped into my head while reading the Dear Author post I referred to in the first part.
More and more people are buying ebooks, right? And with the onset of POD technologies, and ebooks, and the likelihood that the asinine warehouse-law isn't going away any time soon, to promote the long tail and boost the potential 80%-section of sales, there must be more availability -- but in a way that a brickfront bookstore, of a smaller independent vein, can also manage and compete. But at the same time, a lot of people want their books in print, too.
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.
That is, the books that turn over and are reordered regularly -- that is, purchased as hard copies -- continue to be the 20%, the relatively-predictable sales. The remainder goes on the shelf as a single hard copy unit with optional ebook version available. So I could walk into a store, look at a book, and say, "hey, this is Display Copy Only and I want to get a copy," and the clerk burns a disk for me with all the books I want, and hands it over: I walk out with my six books for, say, $5 each and $1 surcharge for the CD. The hardcopy remains on the shelf as display, and the bookstore logs it as an ebook sale.
Does anyone else see what I'm getting at? If I have that one book on my shelf, then it's $12 I've paid, that's taking up $8 of space I could make on a book I've sold elsewhere. If I do sell it and figure it'll sell again, I'm losing $8 for every day I don't have that book restocked. But if I can have that book as display and sell an ebook version then I am literally selling my cake and keeping it, too.
What about those folks who want display-copy versions (essentially, a backlist book) but they want it in hard-copy? That's where POD comes in. If I can take a file to Kinkos or Office Depot and hand it over and get a bound book from them fifteen minutes later, I absolutely fail to see why I couldn't potentially tell a bookseller, I want this, but in hardcopy. And they say, here's your receipt, and your number, and you can either wait around until you're called (like carryout! but with words!) or you can come back in a half-hour, maybe head next door to our lovely neighbor the nifty sushi place, get a bite to eat, and then come back and pick it up.
If a book is formatted and ready in PDF format and I can get it even perfect-bound from Kinkos, then I really can't see a single reason this couldn't be an option for a bookstore, as well: if they have the file on hand, then they could offer it. Again, it's have-cake-and-eat deal.
The important thing is that this extends the bookstore's long tail out to nearly the eight miles' length of the average scrawny library. It's like going to the library and standing by the xerox machine and copying every page of the book, but legally (and a lot cheaper, too). It puts what could be an entire repertoire of 80%-section, unpredictable, potential-lizard-tail, NO RETURNING NEEDED, display-copy books into repeat sales.
Plus, if a book doesn't sell but once in a month, it's okay: you put the hardcopy up for sale. Basically, that single copy has been written-off by its support of who knows how many other sales, and now you sell it in the "hard-copy pile" for half, someone grabs it, space is open for next title. I mean, it's like you ordered one hardcopy but in one day you might've sold eight copies... of a book that technically (space-wise) you only had one in stock.
I would have willingly stripped down and walked the main street of my town wearing only a sock, a feather duster, and a cat on my head if there'd been a way to sell multiple copies of a book of which I only had one physical copy -- let alone to potentially also have an "additional booklist" of immediately-delivered, no-waiting, books that weren't even on my shelves. Because if you have 2,000 books in your longtail, the number of ebooks out there is substantially more than that -- and as people get used to the notion of "buying" a book and "downloading" it into a reader, they may move more and more towards being willing to consider/purchase additional books that aren't even sitting on the shelves but are available for immediate purchase.
Although, that said, I would like to kick Amazon's ass for this stupid kindle crap. I own a Mac, and my Mac has a very sweet screen that's really big. I do not want, nor need, another technological gadget in my life (half the time I even forget I own an iPod). The fact that Amazon is pulling yet another monopoly stunt really pisses me off: not only can you only get kindle from them, you can only read on their tech, and their prices are way higher than makes sense for what's essentially a bunch of damn pixels.
Look, Adobe's tech is free, it's available to everyone, it's possible to lock it, could we just stick to that and stop giving me the flashbacks to the beta/vhs wars?
Because if there's anything that would really drive me mad if someone were to introduce ebook & pod tech as a way to extend bookstores' currently amputated tails, it would be to walk in and be told that because I don't have a Moby or an eReader or a Kindle or WHATEVER that I can't read the books. I'd probably start throwing things. The point is to make more books more accessible, not the other way around.
Oh, and another note, per the previous post: something I don't think people really register that much about the peculiarities of the publishing industry for the past decade or two. There's a lot of talk about how it's dying (man, it's been dying for YEARS it seems) yet the number of new books published every year keeps going up and up and up.
I really think this has to do with the combination of the super-Cerberus stores, with shelf space for 10,000 titles -- and the shift to having only one copy of a book for 80%/longtail sections or topics. Yes, blockbusters and expected-to-be-popular books will have multiple copies, but on any given shelf that's usually one or two titles out of twenty.
In other words, individual books (that are non-bestseller) may not be selling as many copies because Cerberus is only putting out one book for sale at a time. But the number of titles available, overall, is anywhere from quadruple to double even that, above what you used to find in an equal-sized bookstore where the default was five, six copies per title -- and the few one or two copy titles were indicative of "books no one wanted anymore" and thus to be avoided.
Sure, a single author may not make as much on a (single) title, but the system really benefits best those authors with multiple titles. It's turning their multiple titles into the bookstore's longtail, and spreading out the chances of at least one of those books being part of the unpredictable gravy-extra 80%.
DUH and netflix. (Knew I was forgetting something, cripes.)
Alright. So on your local bookstore's shelves, let's say a reasonable size store -- any Cerberus -- probably has, I don't know, maybe 10,000 titles in stock at any one time? Yeah, that sounds like a lot but all the bookstores around here are double-whammy two-floor monstrosities, so it could be even more. Great. How many titles is Amazon carrying at any one time?
...I have no earthly clue. (Because I wouldn't count books out of print, or out of stock, so not actually available, or books on preorder, again not really 'available' in any immediate sense... and I've no idea how to get the numbers but qualified in that way, so if anyone else does, please do enlighten me.)
So let's just say (as placeholder) Amazon has like WAY LOTS.
Thing about Netflix is that, as is repeated so often now, originally it was pooh-poohed because it'd have 60,000 whatever titles and man, y'know, people are only going to watch like 6,000 of those titles -- again with the 10/90, 20/80, lizard-ey kind of lots/little contrast. But in Netflix' time around, apparently it's closer to a third to a half of the titles are regularly rented, with the rest being not-so-regular.
Which I guess would be like saying that if you take a fat iguana and stretch out its tail, eventually the tail becomes part of the body? Wow, there's a visual. Yipes.
What was the other business that reminded me off... hunh. Well, other than Amazon, which has WAY LOTS of titles and turns over more than just a small percentage at a lot, but does a fair bit of business through all the sections/categories.
OH! It's iTunes.
The bigger that iTunes got, the more and more (I recall seeing in Apple news report) they were finding that people were buying these little-known, one-hit-wonder, really obscure artists' works, that you'd never ever find in a music store and that iTunes itself had figured would never ever sell in a million years (but had been put in the catalog because hey, storage is cheap and, well, because those were early adopters with nothing to lose while the music industry big boys hung back and tried to look cool and disaffected).
Every time I see mention of iTunes or its ilk, I want to laugh at the bookstores and the publishers that insist that what they sell is what people want, and that branching out isn't really a wise business idea. Okay, I've already stated that I understand the reason for pushing towards extensions in buying trends: you liked that vampire, you'll like this vampire.
Thing is, what kept me on that track was that I simply couldn't afford to have a massive, massive library of items for sale because I just didn't have the room. I had to narrow it down to what would reasonably sell, was minimized risk, and stick to that and hope I made it through. (It also helped, to some degree, that my niche ended up being relatively specialized: about five or six overall sections, so when you consider I had maybe 2-3,000 titles at any one time, but only in five or six sections, that's a LOT of books on one topic, y'know... which means I was kinda lizarding it but only within very specific topics, as a niche-version.)
But if we can minimize the cost of storage -- like iTunes being able to store a bazillion songs on one server -- then suddenly you can offer a huge amount more. And I think Netflix, like Amazon and iTunes, demonstrates that the more you offer, the more people will poke around and find even more to try/buy. That in fact, the larger the bookstore or library, the broader people are going to expand.
How? Why? I'm not entirely certain. It just seems to be something empirical evidence is showing us, despite the standing industry assumption that people only want the safe stuff and won't go further, so there's no reason to risk anything on what's beyond the pale. But people will, so there is, and if we find a way to make that stretch-more, the lizard-tail, less of a financial risk for booksellers (like with ebooks), then... good things could happen, I think.
Because lizard GOOD.
As
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.
Lizard, you say? Here, for reference:
(I re-ran the numbers of the previous calculations, but using actual recalled #s from my own store, and it falls within roughly the same proportions, so I'm suspecting the round numbers here aren't all that far off.)
I don't recall every having anyone tell me, or even imply, that there was an equation for which books go and which stay, each month when considering returns. (Keep in mind we also had more time to return, which today's booksellers don't have.) But in general, it went something like this. If there are, say, 10,000 titles in the bookstore, then 1,000 titles sold -- reorder these copies, and hope they sell again! That kind of "this sold, PING, system says reorder automatically," that was a usual thing. Most bookstores do that, without any thought at all.
That leaves 9,000 titles that didn't sell, though. If you're on a 90-day rotation for book returns, that means -- and we're pretending here that you're really really on the ball with monthly ordering limits and tracking return due-dates, which scarily some bookstores actually are -- that in one month you could be turning over approximately 3,000 titles.
(Let's take a moment of silence for all those overworked bookstore employees who must go through every single shelf with list in hand and pull those books to put on a cart, pack them up -- and ship at bookstore's expense, did I mention that? -- and send them back. Sigh. I hated that part the most, of anything. It's tedious, and depressing.)
The problem is that the 1,000 titles you're selling monthly... aren't always the same books. Oh, if they were, wouldn't that make things easy! Just don't freaking bother with the other 9,000 titles. The problem is that on average, I found, maybe 5% of those titles were consistent sellers and the rest? Different, every single month. Oh does that make reordering and ordering HARD, or what.
There are lots of tricks booksellers learn, but one of the most useful is that of patterns. Look, we sold six books on tai chi this month -- while I rack my brains for who bought them, did we talk? is there a new instructor in town? were they one-time or a regular interest, oh, crap! -- and we also sold nine books on this and five on that. Okay, let's order six more books on tai chi but by different authors, and see if we can re-snag the original purchasers with more on the same topic.
It works. It works really well. It works especially well when you learn faces (if not names) and someone's semi-regular, so you can say, "hey, I remember you were in here, and bought six books on tai chi, and we've got some new ones in, and I thought of you and ordered them." (I think part of the works-well is because face it, everyone likes to be remembered, too.) I could always sell at least two or three of the titles, if not all of them, doing it that way. That's a way of following a trend, with one person as an example. When you get into larger numbers, it's harder to personalize, but it's still the same thing.
This is also why there are currently a bazillion freaking urban fantasy books out there with similar titles, with vampires, with werewolves, all starring chicks with gun/sword/knife. It's why I don't really blame publishers for playing that game, because I did it myself: you bought six other books on this, here are six more you've not seen, but they're on a topic we already know you like. (Amazon's "you may also like" is just a fancy equation-based version of what I did every freaking day in the shop, okay, and on a million-person scale not a thousand-person scale but HEY technicalities.)
ALRIGHTY then. So first, the 10% books that sell are, mostly, unpredictable. Maybe half is unpredictable and half are repeats (same title) or extensions (same-topic-different-title). If there's a really large regular crowd buying, that repeat/extension proportion is going to get really high; if it's a walk-in crowd like at a mall or some other non-community-grounded kind of distanced bookstore, the repeat part may increase due to constant flux of new eyeballs but the extension part will drop, with the bulk being unpredictable still because the constantly-new-eyeballs are, themselves, unpredictable having no existing relationship with the store.
What does all that mean? It means if you know you've got to sell 1,000 books in one month, roughly, that you can figure maybe 250 or so of those books are as close to sure things as possible: best-sellers, regular favorites, series titles, that kind of thing. These titles sell consistently, and these titles certain people/groups will buy because they want anything on that topic. The other 750 books you've got to push? Well, uhm... put up list on wall! Throw darts at it! That's possibly as good a predictor as anything else.
And that means you need as many books as possible on the shelves, to make sure that of all the potential sales, the actual sales reaches to 750, more if the repeat/extension share falls for any reason. In other words, publishers and distributors may be doing their best to amputate the lizard-tail (with the warehouse issues being a big part of that attitude, admittedly), but the lizard's tail IS, potentially, what keeps a bookstore afloat.
You can see how that slams right up against the push, in the past decade or two, to focus on two things: one, turn those puppies over as fast as possible (even if you don't go so far as intentional, malicious churning like Borders did, there's still some level of churn if you pay at 90 but have to return by 90 as well). Or two, focus on the repeat-sales and extension-sales and try to amp those up to make the 10% break-point, and anything else is gravy.
That's where the Pareto model comes in, that 20% carries 80%. Now, I've got a basic idea of how that works in publishing (and find myself constantly amused and dismayed by what seems to me to be a fundamentally flawed business model), but in bookstores, it's pretty apt and there's not really anything you can do about it. If you order 1,000 books and 200 of these are Rowling's latest, and you know those are going to sell, then... yeah. 20% of your order is effectively paying for the other 80% -- and if any of the rest sells, it's gravy. (Or it's 25% and 75%, or 10/90, whatever, but in general, there will be a few books that just leap off the shelves, and those repeat sales in a very short period of time are going to boost everything, enough to carry along all those other titles on the shelves that are not selling quite so hot-cakey.)
Until the internet came around, the only way to get backlisted books was to order from the warehouse (also possible until the internet, since internet arrived in strength right about when the law changed, anyway), or from a booksearcher. Otherwise, what was in the bookstore was what you could get, or you'd mail-order from someone. When you think about the number of books at the library -- thousands and thousands, and all free! -- compared to the average bookstore, you can see how bookstores had really short tails, everything else being equal. Add in internet + law change, and that lizard-tail just got whacked off.
The problem is the monopoly-effect of having B&N + Borders + Walmart (whom I shall simply call Cerberus from now on) plus the publishers, and all with this emphasis on the "next sure thing" -- that is, the 20% that's hoped to carry the other 80%. Instead of seeing the 80% as a boost to the 20%, they started to see it as a drag. The midlist authors who sit along the lizard-tail (and I use this almost entirely in bookstore perspective meaning), get chopped off rather than considered part of the chameleon's leverage.
I mean, that's really what it is: a chameleon has such speed and balance due to that long tail, being able to counter-balance as it whips around curves. The bulk of its weight may be in the body, with the Rowlings and Browns of this world churning out definite bestsellers and whomping the 20% baseline, but the 80% is where the market finds flexibility, with a variety that allows it to answer and be ready for new trends, by having those topics, too.
A major bookstore, of the Cerberus ilk, is a big fat iguana with a stumpy tail. If you're looking for something in that main 20% area, you're all set. If you wanted something a little different to a lot different you're... probably out of luck. Or you'll find the same "little bit different" title you can find in all the other Cerberus-bookstores. Oh, come on, you cry, there are eighty books on this topic on Amazon, why do I only find the same one by the same author in every bookstore? Why doesn't anyone carry any of the others?
(Simple: because when you don't know what in that 80% will sell, you have to spread it as thin as possible, although this assumes we're not talking about a niche bookstore like "mysteries only" or "SFF books" and whatnot. Keep in mind also that when I say 80%, that doesn't automatically mean copies in total; in fact, it may be that the 20% of titles translates to 50% of copies, especially when you get into blockbusters like Rowling where people expect a table piled high enough to tower over the average child... which again cuts further just how many copies of those 80% of titles the bookstore can manage.)
A library, on the other hand, is a very scrawny chameleon. There may sometimes be two or three copies of really really popular books, but eventually those extra copies get turned over into every library's booksale. The library's long tail, however, is about EIGHT MILES LONG. Title upon title upon title in every imaginable category and if a book doesn't "sell", only the most pressed-for-space libraries will turn over the book for sales. One of my favorite libraries ever was the city library in Washington DC, which rated a book ready for its bookstore when it had not been checked out in at least ten years. Imagine the length of that tail!
So when I say to take the library route, this is my idea of innovation, okay? Your mileage may vary, but it's just what popped into my head while reading the Dear Author post I referred to in the first part.
More and more people are buying ebooks, right? And with the onset of POD technologies, and ebooks, and the likelihood that the asinine warehouse-law isn't going away any time soon, to promote the long tail and boost the potential 80%-section of sales, there must be more availability -- but in a way that a brickfront bookstore, of a smaller independent vein, can also manage and compete. But at the same time, a lot of people want their books in print, too.
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.
That is, the books that turn over and are reordered regularly -- that is, purchased as hard copies -- continue to be the 20%, the relatively-predictable sales. The remainder goes on the shelf as a single hard copy unit with optional ebook version available. So I could walk into a store, look at a book, and say, "hey, this is Display Copy Only and I want to get a copy," and the clerk burns a disk for me with all the books I want, and hands it over: I walk out with my six books for, say, $5 each and $1 surcharge for the CD. The hardcopy remains on the shelf as display, and the bookstore logs it as an ebook sale.
Does anyone else see what I'm getting at? If I have that one book on my shelf, then it's $12 I've paid, that's taking up $8 of space I could make on a book I've sold elsewhere. If I do sell it and figure it'll sell again, I'm losing $8 for every day I don't have that book restocked. But if I can have that book as display and sell an ebook version then I am literally selling my cake and keeping it, too.
What about those folks who want display-copy versions (essentially, a backlist book) but they want it in hard-copy? That's where POD comes in. If I can take a file to Kinkos or Office Depot and hand it over and get a bound book from them fifteen minutes later, I absolutely fail to see why I couldn't potentially tell a bookseller, I want this, but in hardcopy. And they say, here's your receipt, and your number, and you can either wait around until you're called (like carryout! but with words!) or you can come back in a half-hour, maybe head next door to our lovely neighbor the nifty sushi place, get a bite to eat, and then come back and pick it up.
If a book is formatted and ready in PDF format and I can get it even perfect-bound from Kinkos, then I really can't see a single reason this couldn't be an option for a bookstore, as well: if they have the file on hand, then they could offer it. Again, it's have-cake-and-eat deal.
The important thing is that this extends the bookstore's long tail out to nearly the eight miles' length of the average scrawny library. It's like going to the library and standing by the xerox machine and copying every page of the book, but legally (and a lot cheaper, too). It puts what could be an entire repertoire of 80%-section, unpredictable, potential-lizard-tail, NO RETURNING NEEDED, display-copy books into repeat sales.
Plus, if a book doesn't sell but once in a month, it's okay: you put the hardcopy up for sale. Basically, that single copy has been written-off by its support of who knows how many other sales, and now you sell it in the "hard-copy pile" for half, someone grabs it, space is open for next title. I mean, it's like you ordered one hardcopy but in one day you might've sold eight copies... of a book that technically (space-wise) you only had one in stock.
I would have willingly stripped down and walked the main street of my town wearing only a sock, a feather duster, and a cat on my head if there'd been a way to sell multiple copies of a book of which I only had one physical copy -- let alone to potentially also have an "additional booklist" of immediately-delivered, no-waiting, books that weren't even on my shelves. Because if you have 2,000 books in your longtail, the number of ebooks out there is substantially more than that -- and as people get used to the notion of "buying" a book and "downloading" it into a reader, they may move more and more towards being willing to consider/purchase additional books that aren't even sitting on the shelves but are available for immediate purchase.
Although, that said, I would like to kick Amazon's ass for this stupid kindle crap. I own a Mac, and my Mac has a very sweet screen that's really big. I do not want, nor need, another technological gadget in my life (half the time I even forget I own an iPod). The fact that Amazon is pulling yet another monopoly stunt really pisses me off: not only can you only get kindle from them, you can only read on their tech, and their prices are way higher than makes sense for what's essentially a bunch of damn pixels.
Look, Adobe's tech is free, it's available to everyone, it's possible to lock it, could we just stick to that and stop giving me the flashbacks to the beta/vhs wars?
Because if there's anything that would really drive me mad if someone were to introduce ebook & pod tech as a way to extend bookstores' currently amputated tails, it would be to walk in and be told that because I don't have a Moby or an eReader or a Kindle or WHATEVER that I can't read the books. I'd probably start throwing things. The point is to make more books more accessible, not the other way around.
Oh, and another note, per the previous post: something I don't think people really register that much about the peculiarities of the publishing industry for the past decade or two. There's a lot of talk about how it's dying (man, it's been dying for YEARS it seems) yet the number of new books published every year keeps going up and up and up.
I really think this has to do with the combination of the super-Cerberus stores, with shelf space for 10,000 titles -- and the shift to having only one copy of a book for 80%/longtail sections or topics. Yes, blockbusters and expected-to-be-popular books will have multiple copies, but on any given shelf that's usually one or two titles out of twenty.
In other words, individual books (that are non-bestseller) may not be selling as many copies because Cerberus is only putting out one book for sale at a time. But the number of titles available, overall, is anywhere from quadruple to double even that, above what you used to find in an equal-sized bookstore where the default was five, six copies per title -- and the few one or two copy titles were indicative of "books no one wanted anymore" and thus to be avoided.
Sure, a single author may not make as much on a (single) title, but the system really benefits best those authors with multiple titles. It's turning their multiple titles into the bookstore's longtail, and spreading out the chances of at least one of those books being part of the unpredictable gravy-extra 80%.
DUH and netflix. (Knew I was forgetting something, cripes.)
Alright. So on your local bookstore's shelves, let's say a reasonable size store -- any Cerberus -- probably has, I don't know, maybe 10,000 titles in stock at any one time? Yeah, that sounds like a lot but all the bookstores around here are double-whammy two-floor monstrosities, so it could be even more. Great. How many titles is Amazon carrying at any one time?
...I have no earthly clue. (Because I wouldn't count books out of print, or out of stock, so not actually available, or books on preorder, again not really 'available' in any immediate sense... and I've no idea how to get the numbers but qualified in that way, so if anyone else does, please do enlighten me.)
So let's just say (as placeholder) Amazon has like WAY LOTS.
Thing about Netflix is that, as is repeated so often now, originally it was pooh-poohed because it'd have 60,000 whatever titles and man, y'know, people are only going to watch like 6,000 of those titles -- again with the 10/90, 20/80, lizard-ey kind of lots/little contrast. But in Netflix' time around, apparently it's closer to a third to a half of the titles are regularly rented, with the rest being not-so-regular.
Which I guess would be like saying that if you take a fat iguana and stretch out its tail, eventually the tail becomes part of the body? Wow, there's a visual. Yipes.
What was the other business that reminded me off... hunh. Well, other than Amazon, which has WAY LOTS of titles and turns over more than just a small percentage at a lot, but does a fair bit of business through all the sections/categories.
OH! It's iTunes.
The bigger that iTunes got, the more and more (I recall seeing in Apple news report) they were finding that people were buying these little-known, one-hit-wonder, really obscure artists' works, that you'd never ever find in a music store and that iTunes itself had figured would never ever sell in a million years (but had been put in the catalog because hey, storage is cheap and, well, because those were early adopters with nothing to lose while the music industry big boys hung back and tried to look cool and disaffected).
Every time I see mention of iTunes or its ilk, I want to laugh at the bookstores and the publishers that insist that what they sell is what people want, and that branching out isn't really a wise business idea. Okay, I've already stated that I understand the reason for pushing towards extensions in buying trends: you liked that vampire, you'll like this vampire.
Thing is, what kept me on that track was that I simply couldn't afford to have a massive, massive library of items for sale because I just didn't have the room. I had to narrow it down to what would reasonably sell, was minimized risk, and stick to that and hope I made it through. (It also helped, to some degree, that my niche ended up being relatively specialized: about five or six overall sections, so when you consider I had maybe 2-3,000 titles at any one time, but only in five or six sections, that's a LOT of books on one topic, y'know... which means I was kinda lizarding it but only within very specific topics, as a niche-version.)
But if we can minimize the cost of storage -- like iTunes being able to store a bazillion songs on one server -- then suddenly you can offer a huge amount more. And I think Netflix, like Amazon and iTunes, demonstrates that the more you offer, the more people will poke around and find even more to try/buy. That in fact, the larger the bookstore or library, the broader people are going to expand.
How? Why? I'm not entirely certain. It just seems to be something empirical evidence is showing us, despite the standing industry assumption that people only want the safe stuff and won't go further, so there's no reason to risk anything on what's beyond the pale. But people will, so there is, and if we find a way to make that stretch-more, the lizard-tail, less of a financial risk for booksellers (like with ebooks), then... good things could happen, I think.
Because lizard GOOD.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 02:40 am (UTC)Full color covers work.
http://www.northshire.com/printondemand.php
So this will definitely happen as you describe eventually, I think.
I should note that the tail isn't as long as we'd like in many public libraries - the management trend at many locations is to imitate big box bookstores - any book more than 10 years old is suspect, and any book that hasn't circulated in 1-2 years is a candidate for removal. Your library's mileage may vary depending on location, size, management philosophy, history, etc.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 02:46 am (UTC)That is very very cool about the POD machine. Although I can't help but immediately date myself by wanting to say OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE and run around screaming in my best b-grade shriek about pod people.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 02:54 am (UTC)Many large public library systems designate one branch (with good shelf space) to be the home for 'last system copies'. The book is withdrawn based on circulation statistics till the system as a whole is down to one copy. Then that copy is sent to the repository where it is withdrawn usually only if it becomes too damaged to circulate or if it becomes dangerously outdated (i.e., we try to pull home medical books that are 5 years old unless they're specialty classics, because medicine changes pretty fast and 5 year old info on many diseases is misleading and dangerous, but 25 year old info on bookbinding is still probably good).
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 02:59 am (UTC)All I can tell you is that I scored two music books, printed in 1916 and 1920, from that library's sales. Very popular through the 30s, then tapered off, but someone had checked each out at least once every few years... then nothing from '70 on. Sad, but good for me!
(Of course, now you must visualize 11-yr old on metro with stack of books about a foot high, and all books in stack measuring a foot by a foot and a half, and then taking the bus, then walking... wow. The things I did for books.)
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 08:29 am (UTC)Weeding is done mostly for lack of space, and is driven by title number goals. Last time I checked, a few years ago the "modern" goal for "modern" librarians was to keep about 20,000 to 30,000 titles in the adult section of any small branch library and a lesser number in the children's' section. Even a small city like Ottawa (pop about 700,000) can boast millions of titles in its central (Web-based) digital catalogue. The digital catalogue entries follow extremely strict rules, AACR X (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules version X) and give precise locations using the Dewey system.
I wrote all this to ask you a "simple" question:
How are you going to keep track of all those titles in bookstores, if you go to the model you're advocating?
Right now the typical bookstore, large or small has a small fraction of the titles found in most library systems. When I was trying to do a PhD in Library and Information Science I looked up numbers (thank you for refreshing my memory in your blog!) and was surprised at how small they were, compared to even the numbers in a small branch library. What was more surprising and interesting still was the ratio of staff to titles. I suppose that the high number is essential to do all the moving around of incoming and (regretfully) returned books but a corollary of this is that the staff in a present-day bookstore has a much bigger chance to get to know a lot of the titles than the relatively smaller staff of a library. If you wanted to find a book in a good bookstore, any bookseller or clerk could tell you for sure where it was in the store. This is why a bookstore could always get away with a topical arrangement of books, and avoid the high cost the typical library incurs in processing a book/title, describing it with AACR X and classifying it with Dewey. The cost of processing a book/title in a library system can easily double or triple the cost of the book/title to the system. And when I say double or triple I mean double or triple the list price. What bookseller can afford this? If they centralized processing Cerberus probably could, but could any other store bear this?
Then there's the "push" aspect of bookselling which you've covered so well in your blog. You get to know the customers, so you get to know what to order and you get to know what to propose to them. How are you going to do that with the library-sized title lists you're describing? There's a also a "push" phenomenon in libraries but it depends completely on the work of the reference librarian and her (or his, in some instances) masterful handling of the digital catalogue, that costly catalogue made out of book/title descriptions that cost two to three times the list price of the book/title.
The Amazon model seemed like a good one, a few years ago, as a way to avoid the classical library processing/cataloguing of titles. All you needed was to add more subject tags, and put in more visual elements than any library would have thought possible, on their digital catalogues. After all, for the visually-oriented segments of the population those book covers and colourful spines are incredible finding aids in any bookstore. Unfortunately, it all broke down in the last years, as they got in the same million-title numbers as big city libraries. The system still works fine if you're looking for popular stuff, but for anything off the beaten path you'd better go first to the library of Congress and the Web catalogues of the biggest public library systems in the US, find the ISBN and other descriptive elements there and then go back to Amazon with it.
I'm not saying that there's no solution to dealing with this kind of "title richness" problem. I'm just saying that it's an extremely interesting problem. I hope you'll be thinking about it, as well as the technical demands of POD.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 08:44 am (UTC)AHAHAHA I HAVE NO IDEA.
Heh.
The thing is, I don't think I ever read but, oh, maybe 1/1000th of the books we actually carried. Or less. (We actually didn't carry the niche I usually personally read; our niche was semi-accidental, not something rooted in an original personal interest -- we had a wide variety, and narrowed it down as the market responded.) However, I interviewed pretty much every person who bought a book and then walked back into the shop.
"So, you got that book, by so-and-so, what was the title? Right, yeah, what did you think? Was it good? Would you recommend it? What didn't you like? What did you like?"
I actually learned to do that when working in college in a video store. Again, can't see it all, so you learn to ask people. And I've walked into local bookstores and had someone recognize me and ask (usually due to being in 'their' section, at the local independent). Made me laugh, mostly, before answering.
But the point is that I, personally, as pretty much the sole full-time six-days-a-week 12-hrs-a-day employee had a catalog in my head of reviews of near about 4,000 titles. I'm also crazy on the trivia, but it's not impossible. This is a trick plenty of booksellers learn as defense mechanism, as survival mechanism. I've rarely seen librarians use it because, face it, a librarian doesn't have to "sell" a title; they may "sell" the library as an experience but not individual titles. The focus is different, so the information stored in the head will be different.
If I were organizing such a bookstore? I'd do it like a regular bookstore, but clearly label those books that are "display copy" (like with different color tags or something), and then have "recommended ebooks" -- IOW, "if you like this book, you might want to check out these other ebook-only books". My local independent has 3x5 cards every foot or so with store-employee recommendations like that, and maybe half the books I've bought from them have been on the basis of such "hey, what about this!" semi-personal kind of message.
I guess it's just something you pick up, working bookstores. Even in big-box stores I get it sometimes, when someone says, "oh, you're getting that book? you might not have heard about this other one, let me show you." And then you ask, and they say, "haven't read it myself but I've got several other customers who said A, B, and criticism of C but with good points of D." Booksellers are like walking book reviews, I guess you could say.
My icon suddenly seems quite apt.
no subject
Date: 11 Jan 2009 08:55 am (UTC)On second thought, I'm not even sure I get what you mean. I had figured you meant the person-hours to enter the book adds overhead to each book.. but maybe I'm misreading?
When we opened, the only process was, well, the long way. Open box, check packing slip, find book. Check it off, hand over to person who reads off title, author, ISBN, price to person typing it in, and then price tag is printed on sheet, another person finds tag and matches it to book, sticks it on, hands it off to person who carries a stack over to the person shelving... YES we did that for 3,000 books when we first opened. Took six of us about four days. OMG I dreamed in ISBNs for MONTHS.
But these days? If I can get a scanning pen for $200 (or rent one) and scan a book, the ISBN goes into the system and the application brings up list price, author, title, publisher, all that jazz -- a variation on what iTunes does every time I copy a CD over to my computer. It finds the rest and fills in the blanks from a main database.
Way I see it, the building blocks -- the ISBN -- haven't changed. One way or another, if a customer presented a name or store-code that's tied to the ISBN, the system could pull up the file just like doing a search. Here it is, burn it onto a CD or a sim-card that goes into the Moby or eReader or Kindle, and there you go. ISBN-tied to everything.
Unless, of course, you meant something entirely different and I'm just clueless this late at night. It's possible! Matter of fact, it's highly likely!
no subject
Date: 12 Jan 2009 03:30 am (UTC)That's why even though librarians usually have access to "free" book data from their vendors they always have to start from zero when it comes to cataloguing the book, describing it according to the rigorous demands of AACR instead of the nearly free form manner of the publishers and vendors. If they don't they'll end up with a mess of unfindable titles. That's why it can cost such a high price to process a book, apart form the price of the book itself.
Some of the largest libraries split up the work to lower the cost. A library clerk will open the boxes and input the book and its existing data into the system (often with the same scanning pen as in a bookstore) and then check to see the matches with books previously ordered, flagging things as necessary. A library technician (someone with a junior college degree in library techniques) will check the incoming book in the database and match it to existing cataloguing records. If an AACR level description already exists from a vendor (like the OCLC consortium, a huge co-op which does not sell a single book but specializes in selling quality AACR descriptions of titles, sometimes doing the cataloguing themselves, sometimes reselling them from Library of Congress descriptions) the technician will check to see how well it matches the bought title and decide to buy or not that precise description.
About 80% of books bought already have an available description, in the US. They go through what is called "copy cataloguing" because a library person then digitally copies the description that was sold to them by OCLC or another library cataloguing company.
The 20% remaining goes through "original cataloguing". That's when the library technician decides to send the job to one of the library's own cataloguing librarians (someone with a Master's degree in Library and/or Information Science, usually with a specialisation in cataloguing) so that the book can get the exact description it needs, in order to be sure it can be found later.
Paying these persons (or OCLC or others) for the intellectual work of describing a book to high standards (essential for finding anything when dealing with that number of not-always-best-seller books) or for checking to see if a book description is correct accounts for the bulk of the "processing" cost of the book.
That's what I'm talking about when I bring up the extra cost of having to find books in a 100,000 title collection instead of a tiny (for a library) 10,000 title collection. The part where you physically stick a Dewey call number (or alphabet letter(s) for novels) on the spine and the library's own "zebra code" on the book is a relatively minor cost.
no subject
Date: 12 Jan 2009 04:18 am (UTC)So... basically it's bookstore cataloguing ON STEROIDS.
Heh. In the bookselling world, the ISBN is what's tracked, for everything. Right now I can't even recall, but I seem to recall that ISBN is linked somehow to, hrm, I want to say Library of Congress -- it's supposed to be an individualized number that you can use to find... uh. My brain just went, again. (Long day, and I don't have any extra room now after reading your explanation. Seriously!)
It's not that surprising to me, when I stop and think about it, considering that my university's searchable database didn't just have books & info, but for each book also had synopsis, sometimes an excerpt, a list of all books referenced, bibliography, all that jazz. That's about, oh, eighty times more information than you need to sell a book -- or maybe it's just that booksellers keep a lot of that in their heads, instead of on the screen. (With a lot less accuracy as the price, undoubtedly.)