Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” is a new book from the editor in chief of Wired magazine. It reinforces many of the views that have populated this blog over the past few months. There is money to be made in millions of niches world wide. Companies like Lulu saw this a while ago and embraced mums, dads, school teachers, travellers, whoever wanted write their story without mortgaging their house and ending up with 5000 copied of their book in their garage a few months later.
If you have a story then you can get it out there.
This morning I spent an hour with my 79 year old father who is writing his life story so it is ready for his 80th birthday when all his sons will be there to celebrate with him. Imagine how proud he will be handing over a book of his life. And what great stories there are. Already the University he attended are serialising part of it as there is little written about student life way back then when the first students enrolled.
How he is doing it is speaking in to “Dragon Dictate”, correcting the very few words that are wrong and filing it in chronological order. Great eh! Doesn even need to type. (Well a little)
So, for his book there is a niche with people he worked with, preople he studied with and of course the many people he has helped in his life including his extended family. If it is well written and interesting it may even find life out of this confined niche!
Enough of Dad, here is more on Chris Anderson …
TheStar.com – Mass market economy to be a million niches
Flipping for a moment from music to books, we see how fully one-quarter of the sales at Amazon, the online book retailer, comes from books not on the list of top 100,000 titles, causing Anderson to quote venture capitalist Kevin Laws: “The biggest money is in the smallest sales.” Hence the book’s subtitle.
There are other examples — the self-publishing success of Lulu.com is
another cited by Anderson — to make the point the Long Tail equates to
infinite choice. Our interests, says a media analyst quoted in the
book, have always been fragmented. But those scattered desires have
not, in the past, been met. We have been told what we like.
