Tag Archives: the long tail

Old but good

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Jeffrey Trachtenberg wrote about an interesting publishing trend in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required): issuing new translations to boost sales of classics.

Many of these books are in the public domain, although in some cases the translators get royalties.

I’m in awe of people able to debate the merits of particular translations, i.e. in terms of how faithful they are to their originals; it’s beyond me, I’d never presume–translations are always approximations, how can you compare one approximation to another unless you’re fluent in the original language? I’d never presume. (I read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch in the original in college, having learned enough Spanish to manage just that, and to acquire a bit of humility on the subject of foreign languages . . .)

So set that aside, and take a look at the sales data.

The Oprah Effect: since she picked Anna Karenina for her book club in 2004, the 2001 translation by Pevear and Volokhonksy has sold 635,000 copies.

Translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey by Robert Fagles, published by Viking Penguin in the 1990s, “were highly praised and have now sold an estimated 1.5 million copies.”

A 2006 edition of War and Peace (translated by Anthony Briggs) has already sold nearly 11,000 copies.

A successful translation can “generate sales for 30 years or more.”

Those are good numbers. Trachtenberg notes that fewer than 1000 of the 170K books published in the U.S. last year were “literary works in translation,” but it appears to be a solid little niche, doesn’t it. Solid little corner of the “neglected middle” ;-)

Wagging the backlist

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Jeff Jarvis, a couple of days ago, offered some ideas to publishers about how to make money from their long tail — i.e., their backlists. The basic idea is to offset the cost of storing all those books by charging a premium for them–while simultaneously offering a discount on electronic/PDF versions.

Must be in the air, because Booksquare has forayed into the same territory, while raising an option (in the comments) that Jarvis omitted: POD — specifically, the capability to produce one-off print copies of backlist titles.

Booksquare thinks that’s what’s coming — it’s just not quite there today.

POD technology isn’y geared toward mass production yet. It’s getting there. Until then, it’s not cost effective to print very small runs of books to meet demand . . . there might a reluctance to use this technology due to pricing as well — a POD book will likely be at a higher price point than the original version. As I think about it, pricing POD books in general might be something that publishers are just now starting to think about seriously.

Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge will certainly change the dynamics of POD (and I think that Amazon is the dark horse in the book digitization race for this very reason), and as they develop their market there, you’ll likely be seeing more publishers embracing POD as a way to regain control of their backlist. Of course, as I noted in my article, you’re also going to see authors who realize they can simply go it alone. BookSurge’s product is produced much faster than other POD suppliers and is excellent quality (I have a sample on my desk).

Okay, if I were running a publishing company from my armchair, I’d be obsessed with POD. I’d be chewing on it 24/7.

I’d be looking for partners who might be able to do it more cheaply than I could.

I’d be thinking about offering my backlist at a loss if it meant I could establish relationships with prospective customers. Why not offer an author’s backlist titles as incentives to get people to purchase his/her latest book, for example? It wouldn’t even have to be by author — you could use your backlist to get people reading other authors, too, or to get them to explore other, related lines of books.

There’s no reason publishers couldn’t add public domain books to their POD offerings as well. Anything to get people collecting books and to expose them to other portions of a list.

I’d also be asking how price-sensitive people are when it comes to backlist books. Anyone who has shopped for an out-of-print book online knows their prices can soar pretty high. So, identify out-of-print books as just that. “Xxx by yyy is out of print. However, we can create a printed, bound copy from our electronic files if you’d like. Here’s the price . . .”

I’m just sayin . . .

RELATED: I’ve also posted about the long tail here and here, and also about “Resurrection Publishing.”

More long tail tales

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While some journalists are busy lamenting the horrors of the Internet economy’s “long tail” effect on the arts, Lee Gomes, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, asked today if Anderson’s data really adds up.

The article is online here (subscription required).

Anderson responds here.

I find Anderson’s refutations of the column plausible. It will be interesting to see if Gomes takes up the subject again.

My dog in the fight, of course, is the fate of writers who have the chops to please a sizeable readership, but for whatever reason fail to hit a bestseller list. Solid midlisters have done okay, income-wise, in the past. Will that be true in the future?

Hopefully, someday, someone will tackle that issue without succumbing to the “end of the good ol’ days” hand-wringing that has characterized the attempts so far.

Yanking the long tail

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In the New Yorker, John Cassidy ruminates on Wired editor Chris Anderson’s “long tail” hypothesis and concludes that although it’s an idea both unoriginal and flawed, it’s still bad news for mid-list authors. How’s that for a tricky bit of pessimism. Makes you feel a touch of ennui descend just to read that sentence, doesn’t it!

Says Cassidy:

Blockbusters and niche products will continue to coexist, because they’re flip sides of the same phenomenon, something economists call “increasing returns,” whereby the big get bigger and the rest fight for the scraps. A long-tail world doesn’t threaten the whales or the minnows; it threatens those who cater to the neglected middle, such as writers of “mid-list” fiction and producers of adult dramas.

I don’t believe that for a second, and not only because I naturally distrust apoplectic apocalyptic apocrypha.*

Because here’s the thing: there’s money to be made in mid-list fiction and adult dramas, and all the other products and services that cater to the “neglected middle.” And because there’s money there, people will figure out how to make it.

Or put another way: whenever there’s an infrastructure shift like what we’re seeing today with the Internet, a few people manage to snatch up all the good spaces on the board before the rest of us realize what’s going on, and as a result, for awhile, they seem to control the game. Look at what happened with the railroads, to cite an obvious example.

But eventually it settles out. Not everyone can be a railroad baron or found an Amazon, but there are delicious opportunities for the smart people who are thinking, right now, about how to reach the neglected median strip of the Internet superhighway. So don’t despair yet. Despite what you read. This is all only just beginning, this Internet thing.

*Sorry, it’s late, I’m punchy!