Chris Anderson was born in London, but as a child he moved to the United States, where he graduated in Physics. He started his career as editor of the scientific magazines Nature and Science. In 1994, he started working as an editor for The Economist magazine, where he stayed until 2001, when, then, he started working for Wired magazine, where he stayed until 2012. While he was editor of Wired, he wrote his famous article “The Long Tail” that gave rise to his bestseller The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.
In summary, the author’s thinking unveils a new retail strategy, in which it is possible to offer a greater variety of items, thanks to new technologies such as the internet and online stores. As the title of your book suggests, the Long Tail strategy allows you to sell less of much more. In his 2006 article, Chris Anderson makes a comparison of companies like Barnes & Noble and Amazon and, according to him, while the first had about 130,000 titles available, the second had more than half of book sales out of its 130,000 best-selling titles. No wonder, in September 2008, Amazon reached the value of 1 trillion dollars.
See what happened, for example, in the area of book publishing. Until the 2000s, for you, as an author, selling books needed to find a publisher willing to pay for printing and distribution, or you would have to do it yourself. Today, an author can sell books through the “print on demand” system, that is, the book is only printed when sold. It is enough that the author makes the digital archive of the book available, and the online retail companies will do the rest, being able to distribute the book globally. The “long tail” sales strategy has changed the paradigms of decades and decades, opening up new possibilities and reaching new horizons.