I covered Google Unbound Part 1 here.  Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine editor and author of The Long Tail, spoke next: (I took these notes with my TMobile Sidekick and then emailed them to my Gmail account).

10:30 am Break

11:00 am
Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired Magazine  

Chris spoke about how he went from the Long Tail magazine article in Wired in 2004 to the published book, last year.

"..172,000 publish yet only a very small number of books are largely commercial and most are not, but there are other forms of success.

The average book sells 500 copies a year.  Seeing success in terms of hits and economics is wrong, there are many other incentives. We all aspire to be stars but few will be.

Fewer than 2000 books per year and only 1 percent of books published get any marketing budget at all.   A book tour is not the best way to promote an author.

Note: Chris has some ideas about this and is working on a new business idea.  Each book has different niche audiences and need to be marketed to these audiences. 

Book publicists don't really know how to find influencials based on the subject of a book.

Self publishing..lulu
Free ebooks
Free audio book downloads for hardcover purchasers
Google book search
Do it yourself marketing

The article in wired appeared In 2004 and his book in 2006 and Chris became the authority on the long tail and invited to speak about it al over the place - but he only went to one book signing - the rest were company appearances.

Giving away the book did more for the success than anything else,  and the publisher, as supporter, still came up with suggestions that were not helpful.   Some were to turn off the blog archive and trackbacks.  Good thing he did not follow the publisher's advice (even though they were trying to be helpful in their own way).

First year stats
Posts   3.5 week
120,000 words written
1600 visitors, went up to 5000

Free ARC to any blogger who wants to review it (the LT of book reviewers!)  The act of asking for the book.. it's the long tail of book reviews. Chris also was Crowd-sourcing the book and did several meetups instead of book signings.

Question..are their certain subjects that are better for blogs than books?

Blogs are better for temporal things and you can link.  However, in a
book you van not link, you must say it. Chris has the idea to give the book away and then take the application, make money.

That was it for Chris Anderson.