Lets all preschool clap for the internet: Chris Anderson report(ed, 16 years ago) that more than half of Amazon’s sales come from outside its top 150,000 titles. Who are these people writing books that sell one or two copies? Are they even really authors? Which I don’t mean as in, a real author must sell a lot of books; but for real, are they actually not books, but cocktail napkin scribbles that somehow have been published? Golf clap the long tail, but the YouTube videos you see about publishing books still tell me that it is prostratingly difficult.
Also from Anderson: “As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.” One or two streams per month is great for Rhapsody and the listener, but it doesn’t feed a working artist.
If all these long tail books aren’t creating living wage authors, is it because Amazon is fucking them, or is it because they aren’t really books, in the sense of anything that anyone actually reads?
Let’s hope the long tail isn’t composed of 3 AM auto-plays and dusty paperbacks that ship for $1.99; but things that people actually want more than they want what’s trending on Twitter.