The Long Tail Diaries

A little while ago, we put together a small diary of our summer trying to wrestle Amazon for Chris over at the Long Tail and we thought you’d enjoy it this long weekend. We believe 100% in The Long Tail and how license rights holders like ourselves have just as much power as the big studios. Hopefully, you have been as successful with your movies or books.

DETECTIVE WORK COUNTS:

It was mid-summer and our festival pipeline had run dry for the time being. It was time to get moving on our DVD release and we attacked the challenge seriously. We wanted to sell units and knew the Long Tail model was the way to go.

Our marketing strategy was formed along with much input from Brian Terwilliger, producer and director of “One Six Right,” a niche documentary (just like ours) about a well-revered occupation (just like ours) with participants that are very me-driven (just like ours): Ours are lawyers. His are General aviation (GA) pilots and how their airports are diminishing greatly under the hand of suburban crawl.

Brian drove his entire business on post-filters – people that knew of the movie from shop-talk exposure in places pilots love most. His first attempt at launching the DVD went badly. He decided the exposure and volume gained by switching to Amazon more than made up for any margin he sacrificed. We heeded his sage advice.

We collected lots of opt-ins and began building lists of emails that related to our niche. They included lists of law schools and their faculty and students, State, County and local bars, people who had seen our movie at festivals and screenings, friends of the team, and anyone involved in the indie-film market. We also built and/or updated other important post filters like Wikipedia and our MySpace page. We kept our blog fresh. We also planned to pay Amazon to leverage their recommendation system on our behalf.

Shortly before the launch we were featured in the American Bar Journal, which led to the doubling of pre-orders for the week following. Soon after, we got a call from Ebert & Roeper, who decided to feature our film. Woah. This fortuitous series of events sure took some of the risk out of continuing our Long Tail experiment, but we pressed on just the same.

We switched from Amazon Advantage to their CreateSpace opportunity because we decided that replication on our own would be a bad investment at this juncture considering the reviews and such coming in.

We were assured by both Amazon and CreateSpace that our original Amazon page would take CreateSpace-fulfilled orders and the pre-order lock would be released so customers would get the “shipping now” notice as they arrived.

As the Ebert & Roeper review played on a weekend our site visits (unique visitors) began to climb from 274 the Friday before the review to 1644 the following Monday (72 hours). More importantly our Amazon ranking within all DVDs and Documentary/Crime surged. We went from 1854 to 114 on all DVDs. Our orders became fodder of the day. 27 that Friday to 97 Saturday to over 175 that Sunday. This may sound like nothing to the likes of Warner Bros. but it was a great indicator of our future.

By that Monday we were headed into the 500 range in sales when all of a sudden, our Amazon page listed the title as unavailable.

Panic ensued.

Both ends of Amazon had no answers. I hit the refresh button on my browser 439 times in two days. Our ranking sank to 1842 in about 4 hours. Our tail was not wagging.

I went on a mission to call every person at Amazon I could find with every trick I knew. CreateSpace worked hard to find the answers but it seemed that their bridge to Amazon was a bit muddled. We kept getting promises for fixes “overnight”. It never happened.

Our web visitors were angry. The rage of emails from customers began to wear us down.

By the 50th hour, we had Amazon back but without the great discount from before. This made us new enemies. As in any long tail scenario the folks that look, then buy or buy, then look were probably lost.

As for the actual sales data, we went from a very spiked tail head of over $3,600 in revenues over two full days to a mere zero for 50 hours and then, after a large email launch that Thursday, we were able to catch up and make another 200 sales in 30 hours for about $1,800 more. Examining the graphical analysis, our trend line got a big kick in the gut. We would have been able to daisy-chain the initial review sales spike with our email launch at the 900 or 1,100 mark rather than the 500 mark and push it much farther. Clearly, a glitch this size takes double or triple your initial efforts to regain the momentum a big post-filter like the review offered us. How many times people look before buying was the question of the day.

Many of their individual departments that received our emails have quickly become great micro-communication agents. We are getting a lot of “bulk” orders and now many of our stars are coming to the table for more possible mentions in their circles.

So, the long tail maintains what it promises: a continuous sales opportunity. Our team is outstanding and there has been a great deal of massaging and tweaking of the literally hundreds, if not thousands of different pitches we make in any month’s time to an endless and hungry base. It continues every day. After all… it’s a Long Tail.

Pessimistic Law Students More Successful

The ABA’s Debra Cassens Weiss says this in a recent post:

Lawyers are often the exception to the rule. It’s no different, researchers are finding, in studies of optimists.

A study by Duke University researchers found that, on the whole, optimistic people do better in life, the Wall Street Journal reports (sub. req.). They work more hours, save more money, pay credit card bills more promptly, are less likely to smoke, and are more likely to remarry after divorce. (Those who were overly optimistic, however, didn’t make such good judgments.)

Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies positive psychology, says most optimists do better in life than merited by their talents alone.

But with lawyers, the opposite is true.

Seligman’s survey of law students at the University of Virginia found that pessimists got better grades, were more likely to make law review and got better job offers.

“In law,” he told the newspaper, “pessimism is considered prudence.”

Busy Lawyer Compares His Life-Stylist to ‘Outsourced Wife’

By Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal

A partner at a New York law firm doesn’t want to reveal his name, but he did tell the New York Times he is a client of lifestyle manager Allison Storr.

The 39-year-old Storr helps her clients by arranging parties, tracking down the right hairstylist, finding trendy places to visit, choosing the right wardrobe and even finding potential friends.

“Ms. Storr calls herself a personal manager, but her duties go far beyond that,” the Times says. “Her clients, all of them men, pay monthly fees of $4,000 to $10,000 to have her be their personal decider in nearly all things lifestyle-related.”

The law partner told the Times that Storr helped organize a successful ’80s theme party at his house in the Hamptoms for about 200 friends on a $5,000 budget. He thinks of her as an outsourced wife. “The nice thing is that when I ask her to do something, she gets it done and there’s no negative feelings,” he said.

An interior designer who helps one of Storr’s clients describes her unusual business this way: “Allison collects people and shares them.”