Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Mag, wrote a great book called “The Long Tail” about the way the internet is changing how we consume products and media. It was released two weeks ago and it’s already hit the New York Times Top Ten seller list for non-fiction books.

But the best piece of this news (apart from the fact that this means a bunch of people are going to start to get their head around the long tail meme) is that Chris blogged the book while he was writing it, so it should be clear evidence for publishers around the world that blogging a book will not necessarily hurt it’s sales.

Chris sums it up on his blog:

Part of the reason the book is successful, I believe, is because as I was writing it the smart readers of this blog helped improve the ideas, catch my errors and suggest dozens of applications and dimensions of the Long Tail I never would have thought of myself. So today’s recognition is also a recognition of the power of tapping collective intelligence. I couldn’t have done it without you!

I’ve been talking about the book a lot recently and I like using this quote from it:

“There’s still demand for big cultural buckets, but they’re no longer the only market. The hits now compete with an infinite number of niche markets, of any size. And consumers are increasingly favoring the one with the most choice. The era of one-size-fits-all is ending, and in its place is something new, a market of multitudes.