The Long Tail

Wikipedia defines the "The Long Tail" thusly: "The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. However, the concept of a frequency distribution with a long tail — the concept at the root of Anderson's coinage — has been studied by statisticians since at least 1946. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or "non-hit" items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail. Given a large enough availability of choice, a large population of customers, and negligible stocking and distribution costs, the selection and buying pattern of the population results in a power law distribution curve, or Pareto distribution, instead of the expected normal distribution curve. This suggests that a market with a high freedom of choice will create a certain degree of inequality by favoring the upper 20% of the items ('hits' or 'head') against the other 80% ('non-hits' or 'long tail')."

This describes the way I'm approaching my publishing. It's why niche markets can thrive in today's economy where they had trouble before.

Writing for me is an entrepreneurial activity. If you want to see my thoughts on writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com. If you want to read my thoughts on entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog.