Internet marketing made it possible, for very little money, to attract just those people intensely interested in your niche.But two developments took the inherent “long tail” mindset of nonfiction publishing to a new level: When the development and marketing of products was concentrated on the “hits,” it was very expensive to create products and market them to a large enough population to ensure success. Two Developments that Supercharged Nonfiction Niche Publishing Pizza – although this particular tail ends here, another “long tail” begins with all books on making pizza and grows its own tail, with specialties such as deep-dish pizza baking, cormeal crust pizza baking, and so on.Flat breads – even farther down the tail, this subset of yeasted breads is of interest to only a small segment of the cooking/baking population, but they are highly engaged. Yeast Breads – at this point we start to enter the long tail, since this category is much more specific, and people looking here are much more likely to be interested in your books.I’m interested in pizza, not panettone or pastries. Baking – here we’ve narrowed to only one aspect of cooking, coming down the purchase curve, but still in a very large category.But it’s too big a designation for actual sales appeal. Cooking – this is the head of the curve, lots of people are interested in what is a huge market.Here’s how it might look as you travel from the “head” to the “tail.” Imagine you are the publisher or self-publishing author of a book on serious home pizza baking. When I was studying pizza making, for instance, I read almost every book I could find on baking artisinal pizza at home. And the more specialized the book is, the more likely it will find success within the group of people who are intensely interested in that niche. In a sense, most nonfiction books are marketing-driven because they are often written for a specific niche. One thing this means is that if you can make those people aware of the product, they are much more likely to buy it. This capitalized on the “head” of the purchasing curve, where it was thought that most of the money was to be made.Īs the cost to create and distribute products has fallen, largely due to digitization and the ability to market online, it has become apparent that the “long tail” of the purchasing curve contains potentially as much business as the “head.” Not only that, but each product in the “tail,” although it appeals to only a small segment of the population, is perfectly tailored to just that group of people. In the past, when it cost a lot to develop, produce and market products, businesses concentrated on blockbusters, or “hits” that would appeal to the widest possible audience. Probably you’ve heard of the long tail, and it’s certainly mentioned often enough in discussions of online business. In a small way this story demonstrates why non-fiction publishing, including self-publishing, is often a long-tail phenomenon, and has been for a long time before the idea of the long tail was introduced by Chris Anderson in Wired magazine. You can see that he used this same idea when he created his Self-Publishing Manual. He was just trying to fill a need, and that need could best be filled with an instructional manual. Eventually he wrote one and sold it to other parachuting clubs.īut what was interesting was that for some time Dan had no idea he had become a book publisher. As an avid parachute jumper, Dan looked for but could not find a good basic manual for the new people coming into his sport. From of the most interesting stories in Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual is how he became a book publisher.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |