Chris Anderson's new book The Long Tail has been eagerly anticipated. Why? He blogged it first, of course. Partly due to the blogosphere effect and partly because it explains a concept that holds an innate attraction for many of us, it has been greeted with enormous enthusiasm and has been fallen upon as a kind of gospel for our age by content creators in many media. The Long Tail suggests that in this culture of the blockbuster in which we seemingly live, the wonder of the Internet is that it enables - no, encourages, even - the niche interest to flourish as well as the mass market. So, online retailers can afford to 'stock' thousands of titles and are therefore able to benefit from the 'long tail' of small scale sales; niche interest groups can indulge their interests, networking with the comparitively few others that share their passion. Natasha Walter has explained it all much more cogently here at Guardian Unlimited and Chris Anderson himself discusses his book on the Guardian's Newsdesk podcast.   

About a month ago a burglar broke into the Pan Bookshop, lifted  (rather little) cash from the till and then proceeded to urinate and defecate over the stock. This is apparently common behaviour among burglars in the UK (and perhaps elsewhere too).  Fortunately the stupid and unpleasant criminal cut himself on some broken glass and the police were able to track him down. He has pleaded guilty which saves us the trouble of having to go to court. But the affair leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

On a brighter note Hazel Bell has won the Wheatley Award for the index in W. B. Yeats's Mythologies. In these days of Yahoo, Google and other automatic indexing machines it's great that the Society of Indexers still exists to promote professional indexing by intelligent himan beings. The quality of an index is rarely appreciated by the general reader but it can frequently turn an informative book into a real information resource. Let's hear it for the unsung heroes of the book world.

Further to the short mention I gave to Second Life (SL) the other day, Sara Lloyd, Pan's new Head of Digital Publishing, felt inspired to email me this guest entry on her impressions of the SL revolution….

“Second Life is (IMHO) one of the most fascinating, inspiring – and somewhat terrifying – social, cultural and technological phenomenons of Web 2.0. If people ask me where it’s at right now, this is one of the first examples I give.

Second Life is a virtual world. Membership is free. ‘Subscription models suck’, as Cory Ondrejka, head of Linden Labs, creators of SL, commented when he visited us the other day. Instead, the payment model is based on buying ‘property’ or ‘land’ in the world, on which you can build… whatever you like. It is explicitly NOT a game. Second Life has 350,000+ users, a number that is rising at about 15% per month. Of these users, about two thirds are actually ‘building stuff’ on a regular basis. i.e. the proportion of active - or engaged - users to users who just pass through, is *very* high. Only about 0.1% of Wikipedia users actually write stuff. And it’s a lot more complicated to build something in SL than it is to post a Wikipedia entry. SL users are seriously committed. And some of them are making a pretty serious living entirely through this virtual world. (See article from Business Week)  SL has its own currency, Linden dollars, which are exchangeable in the real world for real currency. Hundreds of thousands of ‘real life’ dollars of business are conducted through SL every week. Perhaps more interestingly, the profile of users is not as geeky as you would think: the user base is around 50/50 male to female in terms of hours of use; the average age is 33; older users and women tend to continue to use Second Life – perhaps because they are able to get more out of it; the majority of users do not apparently consider themselves to be ‘game players.’

SL is inspiring because its creators, like so many other successful Web 2.0 businesses, developed a space where people could do interesting stuff, provided the tools for them to do it, then just waited to see what cool things happened and responded to developments. It is also a little frightening because of this. No one, including its creators, really knows what the full potential (or even full repercussions) of SL might be. But hey, it sounds like a great place to conduct some edgy experiments for individuals or businesses with the creativity and willingness to invest (time and money) in it.

For publishers, some of the thought-provoking things that are already happening on SL are: virtual book signings (authors like Cory Doctorow have done this in SL); the development of virtual libraries; the use of virtual communities to test real life business concepts or products before ‘real life’ launch; the presence of publishing companies such as John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing – which has set up an office in the virtual world; the fact that the BBC have broadcast SL versions of their shows; the idea that students can now do a university course entirely virtually through one of the sixteen or so US universities running virtual classes…. I could go on. Check it out for yourself.

A few blog entries ago I posted a comment in response to some pertinent remarks that Peter Collingridge made about what dinosaurs publishers can be when it comes to web site development: “Some very basic things need to be addressed in order to move general publishing businesses from Web 1.0 companies to Web 2.0 companies and beyond. First of all, we need to educate our own staff to be more ‘e’-savvy, effect cultural and process change internally and change our thinking about some of the qualities we look for when hiring new staff; then we need to get the basic ‘building blocks’ right – develop a digital platform for delivery of our e-content, work out how to budget and resource for new ‘strategic’ web developments which do not deliver traditional cash flows, develop leaner, swifter decision-making processes…and that’s all before we do anything creative or ‘blue sky’ with our content or services”, and I wondered aloud, “How on earth do we move away from some of the bricks and mortar, historically-inherited constraints that prevent us moving fast enough for the pace required in this new digital age?” SL is one of those web developments that make these concerns sound like massive understatements. Whilst we are still at the stage of wondering whether we should hire some more web developers maybe we should really be wondering how many ‘avatar reps’ we need on SL..."

N.B. For more info, Timo Hannay, NPG's Web Publishing Director, has also blogged his notes of Cory Ondrejka's talk on Monday here.

In contrast to the problems associated with adult non-fiction publishing, children's books are flourishing. At Macmillan we are still celebrating with Emily Gravett her winning the Kate Greenaway medal for Wolves.

This was closely followed by this press release suggesting that even more good things are on the way. It's really great working with the professional authors, illustrators, designers and editors who seem to proliferate in children's publishing and the results speak for themselves.

A new transatlantic partnership

Macmillan Children’s Books UK teams up with US publisher Jean Feiwel in her new role at Holtzbrinck Children’s

Macmillan Children’s Books UK will be teaming up with Jean Feiwel, recently appointed Senior Vice President and Publisher of children’s books at

Holtzbrinck USA, to acquire jointly and to co-publish select titles.  In particular, books acquired by Macmillan Children’s Books will play a role in Feiwel’s new imprint, Feiwel & Friends; and Feiwel’s projects are already starting to cross the Atlantic to MCB.

Macmillan Children’s Books’ big Spring 2007 title THE BLACK BOOK OF SECRETS by F.E. Higgins will be on the Feiwel & Friends Fall 2007 launch list, and Kate Saunders’ THE LITTLE SECRET will be published in Spring 2008. From Feiwel’s list Macmillan Children’s Books will be publishing a new series by bestselling Australian author Andy Griffiths, as well as Lily Archer’s debut novel THE POISON APPLES.

Sarah Davies, Publishing Director of Macmillan Children’s Books, said: ‘It’s great to have the opportunity to forge stronger links with our Holtzbrinck sister companies and – when the occasion’s right for us both – to have the potential to acquire rights together. The arrangement is entirely flexible, but there are times when standing together will make us even stronger.  Jean Feiwel is a dynamic publisher with a stellar track record and it’s very exciting to work with her.’

Jean Feiwel said:  “My mandate coming to Holtzbrinck has been to make the whole even stronger than the sum of our parts.  I believe it is in the best interests of our authors, our books, our company to work together in a way that allows us to accomplish a global reach, using the best ideas and talents from both countries. Sarah and I immediately connected on commercially like-minded projects.  I am very excited to be working with her and the entire MCB team.’

Macmillan Children’s Books, a division of Pan Macmillan UK and part of the Holtzbrinck group, is a leading children’s publisher in Britain.  It publishes fiction and non-fiction, picture books and novelty books, and the leading preschool imprint, Campbell Books. It has had both commercial and critical acclaim with authors such as Meg Cabot, Georgia Byng, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Eva Ibbotson, and with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s GRUFFALO titles and new picturebook star Emily Gravett.

Jean Feiwel joined Holtzbrinck USA in February 2006 to start a broadly defined children’s effort and to guide strategy within the group.  As well as creating new imprints she will also be publishing into paperback and other formats the backlists of fellow Holtzbrinck companies Farrar Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt and Roaring Brook Press. Prior to this she spent more than 20 years at Scholastic where she invented the children’s series market with THE BABYSITTERS CLUB, GOOSEBUMPS and DEAR AMERICA, and designed the editorial strategy for all Scholastic’s successful imprints.

For further information contact:

Emma Hopkin, Managing Director, Macmillan Children’s Books: 0207 014 6071

Sarah Davies, Publishing Director, Macmillan Children’s Books: 0207 014 6109

One of the advantages of having a world-beating science journal in the Macmillan stable is that one can invite extraordinarily interesting people to come and talk to our staff. We've had a series of fascinating presentations by scientists, politicians, authors. Today sees a talk by Cory Ondrejka who is CTO of Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life. The concept is both fascinating and scary. An article is this week's Observer newspaper describes things better than I could but I do recommend you take a look at Second Life if only out of fear for the future of cyberhumanity.