There isn't all that much news for a real obsessive update, so I'll lump in a few writing-related items of possible interest to people who read books other than mine.
- A real obsessive update item: BradDeLong doubts my book can help his dog.
- How to Teach Physics to Your Dog gets four out of five stars as part of a good books round-up in the Timmins Daily Press in Ontario. (Google News search is nifty).
- A fortuitous discovery thanks to, of all things, an ad in GMail: QM for cat lovers, part of an old blog of imaginary conversations with Einstein. I doubt this will change anybody's mind about my half-serious proposal for ads on the arxiv, but it's kind of cute.
- Nathan Rabin offers excellent advice on the writing business. I'm in kind of an odd position as far as book-writing goes, in that I am not relying on my writing to put food on the table. But my experience thus far pretty closely matches Rabin's (also, we share a publisher. Small world.)
- I'm not the only one who likes to play with sales-related graphs. Of course, Jim is working with BookScan data, which track actual, honest-to-God sales of books, rather than the Amazon sales rank, which is more of a short-term, variable thing, probably in order to make it more crack-tastic for authors. I don't have access to BookScan, which is expensive, so I have to be content to fiddle with the sales rank data, but that's plenty fun as it is.
- 2,876, since you asked. The Kindle edition is 2,352. Barnes and Noble has the hardcover at 43,688, probably because they don't have it in any east coast store from DC north into Massachusetts (not that I'm obsessive, or anything), and the e-book version at 34,385. I think their ranking is more strictly cumulative than Amazon's more time-sensitive version, but I have new classes to prep for, and really can't devote any time to comparing the two.
And that's where things stand at the start of 2010. Now, if I could just figure out a way to get self-reproducing alien monoliths to buy one copy each...
Humanities & Social Science
Physical Science
Comments
Your book was spotted in the science section at Quail Ridge Books n Raleigh yesterday. You should come here and do a reading/signing this year....
Posted by: Coturnix | January 1, 2010 12:02 PM
I'd be happy to come to NC to promote the book, if somebody down there is willing to pay my way. I'd be happy to, for example, give a talk about research or other topics at one of the fine research institutions in the Raleigh-Durham area...
Posted by: Chad Orzel | January 1, 2010 12:10 PM
I have to agree with Brad DeLong. And we're talking one smart dog here!
Posted by: Tim Denton | January 1, 2010 12:57 PM
Do a mini-tour while you're here: Quail Ridge in Raleigh, Regulator in Durham, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill...
Posted by: Steve Burnett | January 1, 2010 3:38 PM
Stoked to find your book from BooksOnBoard in the Stanza app. Definitely getting it on my iphone.
Posted by: Joel | January 1, 2010 7:11 PM
We'll organize something. If we could do it for Skloot, we can use the same organizational framework to organize something for you.
Posted by: Coturnix | January 1, 2010 8:49 PM
Maybe your sales numbers will go up if you offer to do your Monkey Dance(tm).
Posted by: Dave Hall | January 1, 2010 11:41 PM
Great, now if you could do a dog to cat translation.
Please consider Madison, Wisconsin in your tour
plans. Note [1-(v^2/c^2)] precedes E=MC^2 , my
cat Clifford noticed this while chasing a laser pointer!
bt
Posted by: Brandi T | January 2, 2010 9:11 AM