Interesting Business Books

I recently read a couple of interesting business books that I thought I would mention here. The first is called 'The Long Tail' by Chris Anderson. This is essentially a popular economics books that discusses how the internet has changed the face of product distribution. These days, you no longer need a "hit" to survive in a market place. This book discusses all those niche products that are not hits, but can still generate lots of revenue because we no longer need limited shelf space in a shop. Instead we have the Internet, and long with the Internet we have generated unlimited demand. This book is relevant for all sorts of products. So if you sell music, self published books, photos, paintings etc, I recommend reading this book, it was certainly very interesting.



Next up we have a book called 'Buzz Marketing' by Mark Hughes. This is a book about marketing funnily enough. The book talks about how you don't actually need a huge marketing budget to make you products and company known. It discusses using creativity to generate buzz around a product. The author used to be the marketing director for half.com. One of the case studies is how they generated buzz in the press, by renaming a town in America to half.com. This book has certainly given me lots of ideas for the marketing of 'Electronic Critters'.

Both books are quite short so don't take too long to read. I highly recommend them though, they give you a different perspective on running small Internet businesses.