Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means

I'm a number nerd. And when people take a mathematical concept (see also: statistics, finance theory) and think that they can change the definition however the hell they want to support whatever non-math-based argument they are making, it kinda makes my head 'splode.

Case in point: There's a phrase that's been bugging me lately as people are talking about epublishing and self-publishing - the long tail. There are a couple of different definitions for this phrase in business and statistics, and then there is one commonly misused definition that makes me want to scream until the faces of people around me melt off Raiders of the Lost Arc-style. You can't just adopt a phrase that already has a specific (and very good!) meaning and assign it whatever the hell meaning you want. I forbid it!

What Long Tail Means:
A long tail distribution is demonstrated by a graph (graphs are exciting, amirite?) where a high percentage of the frequency of sales (80% is one often used number) are attributed to a small percentage of the items in a population, tailing off rapidly to a large population of items with very small frequency. For example: A small number of books will be mega-best-sellers and most books will fall into the "long tail" and sell a small quantity.

In a business sense, the term long tail is often used when referring to online retailers because they have set up a sales model where they benefit from selling a very small quantity of a very large variety of items - i.e. profitizing the long tail where a traditional retailer cannot afford to keep items which are less likely to sell at large numbers on the shelf - Costco profits in bulk, not specificity, Amazon the opposite.

What Long Tail Does Not Mean:
The long tail has NOTHING to do with how books sell OVER TIME. It does NOT describe the phenomenon where your book that steadily sells a thousand copies a month for thirty years will eventually sell more books than Bestseller X even though it was never a best seller.

Now, I'm not saying that cumulative and backlist sales do not, over time, add up and equal big money - but the thing is, there's already a term for that. It's called "having legs". So why not say "I'd rather have a book with legs than a best-seller" instead of saying "the power of the long tail!" Because, you guys, the power of the long tail is for Amazon and companies who haves set up their sales model to benefit from selling five copies of a million different books, NOT the author who sells five copies a week for thirty-five years. That's legs.

And see, long tail does apply to the self-pub/epub argument (if you're using the real definition). Because minority tastes are being made available (rather than only things which will be expected to sell eleven bazillion copies) there is an opportunity for more diversity in the options available to readers - and writers who write "outside the box" have a place to sell their five copies a week. So if you're using the phrase that way GO YOU! You are a rockstar!

But please try to keep it straight from legs. Enthusiasm is awesome and all, but lack of precision about mathy stuff makes me hear air raid sirens in my brain. Just sayin'. Number nerd out.

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