Shivering Sands, Warren Ellis, and The Long Tail
Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and
