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Business development tips from Bob Young (Lulu.com, RedHat): the long tail marketing strategy
Featuring...

  • Bob Young
    Founder of lulu.com, entrepreneur and record breaker on the NYSE...
Founder of Lulu and RedHat Bob Young explains how his business benefits from a unique kind of long tail marketing strategy:

The exciting bit about Lulu is the people who are in fact driving Lulu’s growth are exactly the people who were under-served by the traditional publishing services, in that they didn’t have best sellers, they weren’t going to sell a million of their books but in their field their book was extremely valuable. So today we now have a million and a half registered users. We have a library or a catalogue to use the publishing term of over half a million published works available on Lulu and our authors will sell to their readers well over two and a half million books this year. It will be printed on average at slightly over one at a time. So our average print run on a book is one and a half books meaning that most of our books sell one at a time and a few books sell five or ten at a time.

Chris Anderson the author of The Long Tail included Lulu in his book, the book version of his story. The concept to The Long Tail being that on the internet you no longer just have best sellers, you don’t just have Pirates of the Caribbean. You have all of those other movies that you have ever heard of. In some each of the movies don’t sell much but in total they sell more than the best sellers will sell this year. That’s what Lulu is only Lulu is somewhat unique in the sense that the concept to the Long Tail is something that was a best seller Gone with the Wind in 1930, but it still selling today but in much smaller volumes. On Lulu we have Long tail content that has no head.

So we will sell two and a half million books but the average book will only sell a few hundred copies a year because these are best sellers in very small niche categories. We do everything on a digital print on demand basis so we don’t actually print your book until you have a customer for it. So when you publish your best seller on Lulu and your mother comes to buy your best seller because of course we all have a customer for our book. Your mother will get a reasonably priced book, you will make money, Lulu makes money on a single copy of your book. And as I say we will sell two and a half million of them, two and a half million registered users to date half a million published books and well over a million by the end of the year.
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