Chris Anderson, editor of the Wired wrote an article called The Long Tail last year, where he argued that the future of entertainment lies not in megahits, but in the steady trickle of money from “niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”
The article was received well — so well in fact that Anderson is now turning it into a book, following the lead of James Surowiecki whose book born out of a New Yorker article — Wisdom of the Crowds — was an instant bestseller.
Anderson maintains a blog on The Long Tail, a “public diary on the way to a book.” A blog is a great way to gather information for a book like this — a look at some of the comments on the Long Tail is enough to convince one of this.
And if the book is not a bestseller, I’m sure Anderson won’t be too worried. After all, he invented The Long Tail.
5 Responses to “A Tail Well Told”
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Hey Karthik, Thats neat. Chris’ article had a lot of forethought. Don’t you think there are few people whose single column grew into a book.
Hey,
I am sure there are more articles that turned into books — just dont know any.
And yes, the article was really good — lucid and thorough.
I just remembered — Freakonomics was born from an article in the NY Times Magazine.
Yeah– and every one of these books s t r e t c h e s to make book-length. They’re total fluff. Add Blink to that list.
Blink was born out of an article?
I liked Wisdom of the Crowds a lot — didn’t get the feeling that he was stretching it. Freakonomics on the other hand seemed a little disjoint to me.