Continuing down the Long Tail

I finished the book The Long Tail: The Radical New Shape of Culture And Commerce. There is lots to mull over, but I think he is right about most of it. Knowing quite a bit about the insides of some of the things he talks about, I can say he oversimplifies a lot. But, that is to be expected in a popular book.

So, how does Eisenbrauns fit in the long tail? Well, last week I posted the results of why people shop at Eisenbrauns. This week I am posting the answers to the second question, "How did you find the books you bought?"

8.4% Left Blank
18.3% Search engine (e.g., Google, Yahoo, MSN...)
0.9% Froogle or other price-comparison search
10.4% Eisenbrauns Source Catalog
3.6% An Eisenbrauns catalog other than Scholar's Source
9.2% Word of mouth (includes blogs and message boards)
16.4% Book News Email
4.3% Other Email List
13.5% Browsing the Eisenbrauns website
0.9% I saw them at a conference I attended
14.3% Other Sources

Obviously, the long tail shows up in the 18% who found us via the various search engines. I have watched that percentage grow until now it surpasses BookNews, which initially was the largest category.

Now, we aren't going to do anything drastic based on these results—like stop going to conferences! This is a snapshot, not a year long study. But, it does confirm some of our long standing opinions, which can be good or bad :)