Sales
drorzel | September 12, 2014I got a royalty statement yesterday for How to Teach [Quantum] Physics to Your Dog (it continues to sell steadily, which is very gratifying), which includes a breakdown of the sales in terms of different formats. That reminded me of a particular annoying quirk of many recent discussions of the state of modern publishing, which is the often unsupported assertion that everything is ebooks these days, and paper books (and book stores) are just a small residual element that publishers and authors cling to out of historical affection.
Since I happen to have my royalty statements in front of me,…
drorzel | September 2, 2014If you're making your weekly check of the ebook editions (Kindle, Nook) of my quantum book (I'm not the only one who regularly looks at these, right?), you may have noticed a change: they're no longer sporting the original black cover you'll see in the right sidebar, but a new cover based on the smash hit UK edition. This isn't a database glitch, but a new release, with a new cover and adding the word "Quantum" to the title.
I've made allusions on Twitter a few times to having exciting news I wasn't ready to share-- this is one of those things. The original edition sold reasonably well and…
drorzel | August 26, 2013The list of editions of my books in character sets I can't read just got bigger: I got author copies of the Thai edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The cover is the "featured image" above (and I'll copy it below for those on RSS), and I love the goofy tongue on the cartoon German Shepherd. The bunny-squirrel-steak atom is also pretty sweet.
Of course, I can't assess the translation at all-- honestly, I don't even know which was the script runs. The pages are all right-justified, so I'm guessing it reads right-to-left, but I haven't the foggiest idea whether the translation does it…
drorzel | April 9, 2012 I'm trying not to be Neurotic Author Guy and obsessively check online reviews of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog every fifteen minutes. I've actually been pretty successful at it, so successful that I didn't notice the first posted review at Amazon until my parents mentioned it to me. It's a really good one, though:
I'm at the point know where I could answer some of the most basic questions that his dog has, but I remember a time when I couldn't and when the questions the dog asks would've been exactly the questions that I would have had. Pretty much every time a statement by the author…
drorzel | March 19, 2012I'm trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the podcast interview), while the Kindle rank went up dramatically. This suggests that people who listen to that particular podcast are less likely to buy new books on the Kindle than new books on paper.
This got me wondering, though, whether this was an anomaly, or a general truth…
drorzel | February 29, 2012One of the big stories in genre Internet news was Seanan McGuire's post last week, about reactions to the early release of some copies of her book, and the hateful garbage thrown her way by people outraged that the ebook didn't slip out early as well. And let me state right up front that the people who wrote her those things are lower than the slime that pond scum scrapes off its shoes. That's absolutely unconscionable behavior, and has no place in civilized society.
That said, Andrew Wheeler picked up on something that also struck me as odd, namely the way McGuire was so upset about paper…
drorzel | February 22, 2012A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:
As you can see, How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog is #55 on their bestseller rack, just ahead of Confessions of a London Call Girl. I'm not sure what this says about London call girls, but I'm pretty psyched that it's still selling well over there.
On this side of the Atlantic, I got a note from my editor at Scribner the other day that they've just printed another batch of the US paperback of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, which is also good news. There's probably a blog post in…
drorzel | April 22, 2011A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them.
So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This…
drorzel | January 9, 2011A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the "New and Bestselling" shelf at a WH Smiths " at one of the service stations on the M20." You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it's doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as "the American edition..."
Anyway: Woo-hoo!
drorzel | December 31, 2010Late last year, Matthew Beckler was nice enough to make a sales rank tracker for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Changes in the Amazon page format made it stop working a while ago, though, and now Amazon reports roughly equivalent data via its AuthorCentral feature, with the added bonus of BookScan sales figures. So I've got a new source for my book sales related cat-vacuuming.
Still, there's this great big data file sitting there with thousands of hourly sales rank numbers, and I thought to myself "I ought to be able to do something else amusing with this..." And then Corky at the Virtuosi…
drorzel | December 15, 2010As previously noted, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is selling very well via the Guardian's online bookshop, among other UK venues. It's doing well enough that I might need to start referring to the original text as the American edition of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog...
There's a nice ironic twist to the Guardian aspect of it, though, in the form of a review by that paper that I hadn't previously noticed until this book business summary brought it to my attention. It's a blisteringly bad review, basically dumping hate all over the talking-dog conceit. Which,…
drorzel | December 9, 2010How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog continues to sell very well. The vanity search today led me to this, screen captured from the Guardian newspaper in the UK, which sells our book in its online bookshop:
Woo! Take that, biology!
Yeah, yeah, I should be so lucky as to squeak onto the list in 150 years. Still, it's kind of a hoot to see that list.
drorzel | November 9, 2010I haven't been doing these as regularly as I was earlier in the year, but here are a few interesting bits of news about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
LA FISICA SPIEGATA AL MIO CANE, is now available. That's the Italian edition, which Google translates to something like "Explaining Physics to My Dog." Emmy is disappointed in that translation-- she was hoping it had something to do with spaghetti, preferably with meat.
This appears to be a review of the Chinese edition, though I can't read a word of it, and Google Translate isn't really up to the task, rendering one whole paragraph as "…
drorzel | October 28, 2010The Times Higher Education magazine in the UK, that is. They ran a review of my book a couple of weeks ago, which I've only just noticed:
The approach is quite entertaining. The tone of the book is chatty and contains some truly awful puns involving dogs, which, if you can stand them, make it an attractive and lively read. However, don't be fooled - Emmy is no ordinary dog. She can reason with the informed leaps one may expect from a physics undergraduate, despite peppering her conversation with "squirrel", "bunny" and "chase".
If you're in the UK, the edition the review refers to is on sale…
drorzel | October 24, 2010Between my long-ago high-school French and Google Translate, I can tell that this is a good review of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. It does note, though, that reading the book requires knowledge of English to understand it, which is a problem. And, as far as I know, French translation rights haven't been sold yet... French publishers, je vous regarde.
In other foreign-edition news, we've sold German and Turkish rights, so there will be editions in those languages eventually. Emmy was very happy to hear that the book will be published in Turkey, though that was mostly a case of preposition…
drorzel | October 7, 2010Between travel and general work craziness, I completely forgot to note that the UK version of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has gone on sale:
The title for this edition is How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and the vanity search keeps turning up mentions to it in the Guardian Bookshop, so I guess they like their dog physics with extra quantum in Britain. Anyway, if you've been waiting and wondering when there would be a version with fewer idiomatic Americanisms, it's here, and available from the usual sources.
This brings the in-print edition tally to five, that I know of: the…
drorzel | June 23, 2010The US managed to survive yet another appalling lapse of officiating and beat Algeria 1-0 on a goal in stoppage time. Simultaneously (in some frame of reference), England beat Slovenia 1-0. With South Korea advancing yesterday, countries with current or forthcoming editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog are 3-0 when it comes to advancing past group play. Meanwhile, France, where rights have not yet sold, was eliminated.
I'm also happy to report that Spanish translation rights have been sold, and a translation is in progress, so Spain can go into their final group play game without…
drorzel | February 17, 2010A couple of reviews, an offer, and a mystery regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
The reviews:
A review at suite101 that went up a while ago, but I somehow missed in the vanity search. It's a nice, detailed review, and if I had to pick a pull quote it would probably be: "You can be prepared for a good scientific romp throughout Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. Thinking like a dog is a big help."
Scott at a physics teaching blog has a more recent review: "I often pick up books and don't bother finishing them. This book kept pulling me back to discover what oddity was next. I…
drorzel | February 12, 2010Miscellaneous stories and links about How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
-- There's a nice review by Margaret Fisk (who has been reading it for a while, and mentioning it on her blog, which kept turning up in the vanity search):
Orzel does a wonderful job of finding physical parallels to explain quantum concepts in ways that make a reasonable amount of sense, whether in the behavior of dogs on a walk or the "magically" refilled food bowl. Though scientifically inclined, through a series of events I ended up with little formal training, and this book is written for people in just that situation…
drorzel | February 3, 2010It's been a while since I've done a fun with graphs post about the Amazon sales rank of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that's not because I've stopped tracking it. It's getting to be enough data, though, that it's worthwhile to look on a slightly coarser scale, so here's the sales rank data binned by day:
This shows some clear structure, specifically two points with dramatic drops (that is, dramatic improvements in the Amazon rank-- smaller numbers are better), followed by slow climbs. The two big improvements correspond to the immediate post-publication blog boost, and the…