Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I guess everyone is aware of the long tail in ebook publishing but reading your post made me think about it in a somewhat different way. I've always seen that as an advantages for publishers and for readers but maybe it ain't so. Maybe when ebooks become "the thing" and paper books are a minor format and that makes old books more readily available to more people, readers will have less interest in the latest book and there'll be fewer blockbusters.
I'm sure the blockbusters will never go away but they're so heavily depended on by publishers any significant decline in them could be pretty harmful to the bigger publishers.
Personally I like older books and I love the idea of the long tail. Anyone remember Pat Frank's book "The Age of the Tail" where everyone after a certain date was born with a tail? That made it really hard to hide your age when you were older than that and it made for a big market for artificial tails.
Wait! Was that a digression?
Barry
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Blockbusters have already declined.
Even the biggest of names are hurting:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...04e5-304500337
The way it works is that the everywhere books (I need to trademark that phrase.
) get the bulk of their sales from casual readers but (big but) casual readers aren't early buyers, much less preorder buyers. Early sales are what create the buzz for the bandwagon buyers that follow and make the blockbusters blockbusters. Early sales come from true fans (gotta have it now!) and heavy readers. True fans are showing up in similar numbers as ever. The heavy readers aren't. As a result the buzz isn't building and the bandwagons aren't rolling and there is a shortage of old school blockbdsters. There will be another Potter or Twilight or Fifty Shades but it won't be soon.
The reason is, as you inferred: heavy readers are spreading their attention and money around. No longer does the bulk of the money go to the top one hundred titles but instead it goes to the top ten thousand. And no longer do new releases have to contend solely with recent releases but instead they have to contend with all releases in their genre and subgenre going back years and decades. For SF&F this isn't a great change--the genre has long celebrated its history and backlist--but for other genres it's a sea change.
Where before the sales/revenue vs ranking curve had a very high peak and a very steep angle, today the peak is lower and the falloff smoother and less steep.
Authors are noticing it takes lower sales to attain a given sales rank at Amazon but measurable sales go way lower than before. Unavoidable, when their catalog is five million deep, compared to maybe 50,000 when Kindle launched. And then there is KU delivering hundreds of millions in author payouts and probably costing even more in displaced sales.
The pyramid will likely continue its "melt" indefinitely. The top sellers will probably stabilize at some low multiple of the size of their truefan base and others will go down from there.
Along the way I think publishers' frenzied pursuit of blockbusters will decline and they will be forced to actually market their midlist. Not a bad thing for those writers stuck in tradpub contracts.
Us readers, on the other hand, will benefit from the ever-increasing supply of known-good books to choose from.
The end of the tyranny of the blockbusters is a good thing; there's alot of good books that have been shortchanged by the obsession with the big early sales. Some books just need time to find their audience. Now they'll get it instead of being gone and remaindered after three months.