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 co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks.

And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote the book back then, and he sure as shit isn’t promoting it now, but I found myself dredging up old blog posts on his former blog and realised that it existed.

Since I’d been on a bit of a Warren Ellis kick, and a lot of what I was reading from his 2009 ramble fed into my current interests, I swung $20 on getting a copy printed and fired in my direction.

Fuck knows if I’ll ever get it, given the state of the world at the moment, but I’ve made the attempt. Eleven years on, this weird little book of Warren Ellis reprints is earning him a little cash and me a whole lot of joy.

And eleven years later, I’m talking about the book. Sending fresh eyes in its direction. Letting folks know my appreciation for Ellis work, and why I’m excited for this book in particular.

If he and his collaborators had updated it to release in an actual ebook format, and published through the more contemporary POD services that feed into distribution, I suspect it could be earning more than it does.

I also suspect that Ellis is content to have the book lying fallow, occasionally purchased by fans like me who track its existence down.

“Sure,” you say, “but Warren Ellis is a massively popular comics writer, turned massively popular script writer, and was a bit of an internet celebrity back in 2009.”

Sure.

But here’s the thing: I wrote and published RPG gaming books from 2005 to 2007. I wasn’t particularly well known, and have largely disappeared from the scene after I gave up publishing. The edition of D&D my books supported was at least two editions back, and the same is true of the small handful of other games I wrote content for after they opened up their games to third-party publishers.

Like Ellis, I let the old releases go fallow. They don’t get updated or transferred to new formats. I don’t try and find new sales channels. It’s been thirteen years since I did anything more than look at the sales figures, and there are still the occasional weeks where I earn more from a dozen D&D spells I wrote in 2006 than I do from fiction.

And that’s what the long tail is: picking up a little bit of cash from things you wrote a decade ago. Which, notably, was still in the era when digital publishing and ebooks still felt shiny and new, and POD was still a weird-as-heck struggle to get stuff uploaded.

It’s better now. Cleaner and more efficient and feeding into the same places you buy all your other books. It won’t stay that way forever–ebooks will be disrupted, as will POD, but the formats will still have it’s fans and there’s always the option of updating and repurposing.

And writers who have come of age with the internet produce an awful lot of content they can update and re-purpose, if they’re willing to embrace the skills they need to do it fast-and-cheap.