It's not about rags to riches

Alessio Iacona, an Italian journalist, has a question:

Dear Mr Anderson,

Recently, I've had the chance to write more than once about your interesting theory called "The Long Tail". But now I'd like to ask you to comment on a brand new Long Tail case.

In 1995 a quite anonymous chef named Simon Hopkins published a book called  "Roast Chicken and Other Stories". For about ten years the book lived an obscure life on library bookshelves until a panel of leading chefs, writers and restaurateurs nominated it "the most useful cookery book of all time". Then the "Long Tail experience" took place: a lot of people went out to buy the book but they couldn't find it in bookshops. So they turned to Amazon.co.uk, which received so many orders that "Roast Chicken and Other Stories" jumped in 48 hours on the first place of the 100 top sellers list, passing the sixth volume of Harry Potter.

My question: What do you think about it?

Alessio,

    Thanks for the example, which is an interesting one. It's not really a Long Tail case, however, because the LT in books doesn't really start until about Amazon rank 100,000 (prior to the nomination that book had been in the realtively-healthy 40,000s) and I imagine the title was actually still available in most UK bookstores. But it does show the virtue of keeping the back catalog available.

    Although I used a similar example ("Touching the Void") to begin my Wired article last year, such rags-to-riches tales are not really the typical LT story. The point I'm making in my writing is that products don't have to become hits to be a success and fill a need. Now that online retail economics allow us to offer and sell modest-selling niche products efficiently, we don't have to settle for one-size-fits-all products of broad appeal. Narrow appeal is often better when it's narrowly-focused on your interests, and today the economics of digital distribution allow such micro-markets to exist profitably alongside the mainstream.

    The fact that the occasional title is catapulted from the Long Tail to the Short Head is certainly a reminder that great stuff can be found in the tail, but it's the exception rather than the rule. A much more frequent, and better, example is the niches in the tail that are finding new demand, two, three, even ten times what they'd seen before thanks to the power of the Internet to help people find and obtain non-mainstream fare. That doesn't make them hits; it just makes them more successful niches. But that's the real power of the Long Tail.

Best,

Chris

Comments

[Jeremy Cherfas]

To call Simon Hopkins "quite anonymous" is, I hope, a failure of translation. He has long been a mainstay of good food writing in england.

[Alessio Iacona]

Dear Jeremy,

I'm not a food expert so tht's probably why I've never heard about Mr Hopkins. But it seems I'm not the only one:

The Telegraph:
"After eight months on top of Amazon's best-seller list, J K Rowling was yesterday dethroned by a relatively unknown food writer."

Probably "quite anonymous" was too strong an expression, but that's where information came from.

thanks for your attention

Alessio

[Jem Stone]

Just to give you more context about this. This isn't really an example of word of mouth (similar to the Touching the Void example cited in your original article).
The excellent "Roast Chicken and Other stories" by Simon Hopkinson (and Lindsay Bareham) was last week voted the most indispensable cookery title by a specialist food magazine in the UK; Waitrose Food Illustrated. The results of the poll received extensive press coverage in the UK as this is a relatively obscure book by a relatively obscure author (although a highly respected one) and because it had outpolled TV celebrity chefs such as Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver.
This sudden media attention has no doubt done wonders for its demand and explains the surge up the amazon lists. And its Hopkinson not Hopkins!
So its some of the "old media" filters that have done the trick here.

[John "Z-Bo" Zabroski]

Chris is right. Product explosions happen all the time. Even in small social groups, one person starts out reading a good book and it makes its way to one more person, and then even more from there. Among programmers I know, Andrew Koenig's Accelerated C++ started out with one person reading it and within three months almost everyone read about it. Product explosion is necessarily a Long Tail effect as Chris already said very well. However, if that product explosion never could have happened because the material never found a willing publisher, then that would be a Long Tail effect. Chris has already put an idea like this in his Long Tail Sidebar, from a New York Times article: ''Companies like Random House and Simon & Schuster want to find Deepak Chopra; they don't want to find a writer necessarily who has an audience of 10,000 people,'' says John Feldcamp.

[james governor]

the arguments against all ring true. but if the book was written ten years ago and the buzz is only really building now that surely has some long tailness about it?

[megan conklin]

Sorry so late to this party, but I wanted to respond to the last commenter who said

"if the book was written ten years ago and the buzz is only really building now that surely has some long tailness about it"

I think what you're asking for is for this book had a graph of its own -- the x-axis of the long tail graph (for just this book) shows sales per month, and the y-axis showed sales. Then you could see the long tail for JUST this book.

(I'm not sure if studying such tails would be appropriate for the general research on this site -- "rags to riches" stories are essentially long tails of a single product over time -- but it would at least answer the question you're asking.)