Tuesday, November 01, 2011

watching the lights go down, letting the cables sleep

Well, this was unexpected. On my first day in recent memory in which I expected myself to behave like a polite young professional, I got utterly and totally blitzed. My bad?

I shall start at the beginning. I didn't sleep at all well last night; I went to bed at midnight, but since I normally don't sleep until 1 or 2am, this was quite difficult for me. I eventually let myself sleep just a bit, so I missed the keynote of the conference that I'm attending -- but I still made it downtown by nine, which I counted as a victory. The conference is extremely interesting, with a lot of implications about how media/content creation and delivery will change over the long term, and I'm glad I participated. It was quite an exhausting day, given how much there was to talk about, and I got into a bit of a twitter spat with a dude who actually said "no offense, but I think you don't understand what the long tail is" (when I spent seven years at my previous job working with the long tail - and the point I made was that anyone who thinks the money is in the long tail is kidding themselves. If you're running a studio (or Google) and have thousands/hundreds of thousands of contributors in your long tail, you can make money off of it, but if you're one of the content creators *within* the long tail, the amount of money you'll make off of any one piece of content you create is unlikely to support you). I really, really hate fifty year old men who treat me like an incompetent child because I look like a cute nineteen year old instead of a potbellied old man.

Moving on, the rest of the day was good. I skipped the last session to have drinks at the bar with one of the women from the San Francisco romance chapter; she introduced me to a friend/fellow conference goer who used to work at Pixar and was the forehead model for Mr. Incredible of "The Incredibles" (incredible!). After my two mojitos there, I came home (via a cabbie with whom I had a v. heated discussion about abortion, to the point that he went the wrong direction and then reset the meter when I pointed it out). Terry came home shortly thereafter, and we went to Chandlord's general stomping grounds to have drinks and pizza/chips/guacamole at Olive. After two drinks there, Terry dropped me off at Chandlord's and went home, while I spent some quality time watching "Gossip Girl" with Chandlord and drinking the extra bottle of champagne left over from book club.

Geetika showed up at some point, and we polished off the champagne before heading out into the night. Our luck wasn't good, since many things were closed, but we ended up at some Thai place across the street from Olive that was amazing. Why I ordered a malbec, I don't know, since it was my eighth drink (four cocktails, three glasses of champagne, one wine), but I did -- and the pad see ew and the papaya salad were awesome. I abandoned Chandlord and Geetika at that point, caught a cab home, and am now contemplating the sweet release of my pillow so that I can get six point five hours of sleep before going to the conference tomorrow. Goodnight!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay for us really old folks, what the heck does long tail mean ?

Sara said...

There's a really long wikipedia article about long tail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

But basically, the concept is that for a retailer, a small number of products account for a large number of sales, but that you still get a significant number of aggregate sales across a very large set of infrequently-purchased products. For instance, if you're Home Depot, maybe 80% of your business is in lumber (probably not, this is just an example), but it's still worth it to stock light bulbs, hammers, tape, sockets, etc. because those sales in aggregate add up to something important.

In internet businesses like Amazon, where there's a low cost for storing merchandise because they don't have to maintain a storefront, they can blow out the long tail and stock one of everything in existence to capture niche demands (or, not even stock it, and print on demand or order a copy if a customer happens to order it). This is even more true of ebooks - it costs them pennies to store a master copy of the ebook, so they can offer millions of them without significant cost. In that case, maybe the Stephen Kings and James Pattersons of the world account for the major sellers, but Amazon makes a lot of money off of selling 1-2 copies a day/month/year of all the other books they stock.

The point I was making to the dude I was arguing with, though, is that when someone says 'the money in online media is in the long tail', that's technically true -- but the significant money goes to the distributor (Amazon), not to the artist. If I write a book that's 'long tail', I may only get a few dollars a month, but for Amazon, my few dollars plus a million other peoples' few dollars adds up to significant revenue. He seemed to think that long tail = a perpetual revenue stream, which is *possible* - but if no one ever finds your book because you have no visibility, you won't make anything substantial. Amazon will, though.

Sorry, that got long-winded :) But it's an interesting topic to me, even if it isn't very romantic.

Anonymous said...

so are you thinking that you would not sell your ebooks though Amazon, but only through your web site?

Sara said...

No - I'll sell my books through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Apple, and any other platforms that make sense. When I said that the 'significant revenue' goes to Amazon, I meant that they get a significant amount of revenue by aggregating all the little bits they get from each individual writer.

Most of the major ebook-only distributors for self-published authors take 30% of the list price -- which is still way more money for the author than what s/he would get from a traditional publisher. Through Amazon, I get 70% of the list (if the list is >=$1.99, I believe). Through a regular publisher, on an ebook I would get 25% of their 70% share. But giving up 30% to Amazon is worth it for the availability to the audience, since it would be quite hard to build any audience if I only sold on my site.