"Quarterly" Amazon Stats

I'm at bit tardy on my Amazon sales rank summary -- should've had one out in August.  No matter, here's the graph.  Remember that with sales rank, lower values are better.

In general all Plone books are trending upwards, which is not unexpected considering that the Plone 3 titles are being replaced by Plone 4 ones.  Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone 4 Development tops the chart so to speak with a sales rank of 156K with de Alba close behind.  Plone Live once again is in the basement (at the top of the chart), but that is more likely due to its heavy reliance on non-Amazon sales channels. 

The table of the current titles and their sales ranks are given in the table below.  Of interest this time is the column on sales/yr.  I found a graph that illustrated the approximate Amazon sales rank function, which turns out to be a power law.  A little regression with Open Office Calc gave me an equation of

f(x) = (1.3*10^6) * (x^-1.1)

This equation has numerous potentially huge sources of error, but I thought it would be interesting to toss it out and let the authors themselves reflect on the results.  Please note that these are Amazon-only numbers.  Because most titles are published by Packt, this almost certainly is a small fraction of total sales. 

Amazon Page Rank Stats	November 2011
Title	Author	Sales rank	Sales/yr	Rating
Professional Plone 4 Development	Aspeli	156,335	150	4.50
Plone 3 Intranets	de Alba	192,392	120	4.00
Plone 3 Theming	Williams	704,159	29	5.00
Professional Plone Development: Plone 3	Aspeli	692,760	30	4.67
A User's Guide to Plone 4	Nagle et al.	755,217	27	n/a
The Definitive Guide to Plone (2nd ed)	Delmonte, et al.	984,891	20	1.00
Building Websites with Plone	Cooper	1,050,568	19	3.71
Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook	Giménez & Romero	1,270,629	15	4.00
Practical Plone 3	Knox et al.	1,025,403	19	4.80
The Definitive Guide to Plone (1st ed)	McKay	1,239,686	16	4.14
Plone 3 for Education	Rose	1,722,143	11	4.00
A User's Guide to Plone: Updated for Plone 3	Lotze & Nagle	1,773,374	11	3.00
Plone Content Management Essentials	Meloni	1,801,775	10	3.11
Content Management with Plone: Handbook	Lotze& Theune	1,954,272	10	n/a
Plone 3 Multimedia	Gross	2,833,640	6	3.67
Plone Live	Pelletier	2,886,475	6	4.80

I'd like to find out what actual sales numbers are directly from authors, but only if you don't consider it SBI, "sensitive business information". 

Quarterly Amazon Sales Rank Stats

It's time for me to pull myself away from the Herculean task of emptying out my parents' house and get back to our regularly scheduled program.  It's the beginning of the quarter when I usually take a moment to see how Plone titles are faring over at Amazon.com.  Here's the latest sales rank statistics for Plone texts: 

From the zigs and zags you can see that Amazon sales ranks, as always, aren't very stable.  Julie Meloni's "Plone Content Management Essentials" took a huge leap.  (Remember low sales ranks is a good thing.)  And in fact, just about all Plone texts improved their sales ranks.  Four books have sales ranks below 200,000 and only three had their rank go upwards (Rose, Cooper, Lotze and Theune).  Frankly, I'd have to say this trend, if it continues, could indicate a healthy turn of affairs just in time for Plone 4. 

More Stats from Amazon

Its been another quarter and its time for a look at Amazon sales ranks for Plone books. From the graph above, you can see that some texts are bouncing around while others are trending steadily. I can't really explain the sales improvement for many titles last July (remember "dips" are actually good in terms of sales rank). The new titles have lost ground somewhat after the initial flurry of sales, but no one has gone over a cliff.

Without doing any further analysis (hey, its 3 a.m.), it looks like there's a cluster of books in the low to mid hundreds of thousands and another cluster above 800,000. We'll have to wait until December to see if this pattern is persistent.

My own behavior might explain some of this from an anecdotal point of view. At my day job we've just been going through the upgrade from 2.5 to 3.1 (don't ask). At any rate, its time to dust off my notes from Joel Burton's class last year and buy the Plone 3 texts for the rest of the staff. Not being an early adopter in the Plone upgrade process, we've held off on upgrading our technical library until now. I suspect others are in the same boat and this sort of lag will continue to drive Plone 3 book sales for some time.

I read with interest a piece from Morris Rosenthal where he's basically reverse engineered the sales ranks. Despite that, Amazon numbers are amazingly fluid and trending them is tricky, especially for those with ranks below 20,000. He's got some interesting graphs and an insightful writeup. In simple terms, Morris states the obvious:

Read an average rank of 1,000 to mean you have a seriously successful title, an average rank of 10,000 to mean your doing pretty good for a book that's no bestseller, an average rank of 100,000 to mean it's not going to contribute significantly to your income, and an average rank of 1,000,000 to mean you need to take a break from checking sales ranks.

Of course, these are Amazon numbers, so remember that online sales (Pelletier & Shariff) and direct sales from our friends at Packt (many of the others) will have a significant impact. Its also nice to note that Plone top sellers have ratings of 4.5 to 5.0.

By way of comparison, Drupal has four titles with sales ranks under 20,000. Unfortunately, they all have ratings of 4.5 or less. Joomla has three titles ranked under 50,000. Their ratings are 4.0 or less. WordPress has four books ranked under 20,000 ranked variously between 3.5 and 5.0.

Quarterly Amazon Stats

Its December and time for my quarterly statistics on Amazon sales ranks for Plone texts. Remember that when it comes to Amazon sales rank, big numbers mean low sales. That said, Aspeli leads the pack ever so slightly at #310,527 followed very closely by Lotze, et al. and Cooper. Pelletier and Shariff are at the top of the graph and bottom of Amazon sales rank, no doubt because of their effective direct e-distribution.

There are two newcomers to the graph: A Users Guide to Plone (Lotze, Runyan, Hasecke, Nagle) and The Definitive Guide to Plone, 2nd Ed. (Reale, McKay). The latter is due out next April and is available for pre-order. Recall my earlier post about racking up a favorable sales ranks by coordinating pre-orders.

By way of comparison with other CMS, VanDyk's Pro Drupal Development has a sales rank of #8,385. Mercer's book comes in with #15,746.

Practical Plone Preorders

I was looking at Jon Stahl's recently uploaded slide deck for non-profits and noticed his plug for Practical Plone 3. That jogged my memory and I went back to YouTube and tracked down Jon's "Online Social Networks: Can They Power Social Change?" video, a one-hour collection of lightning talks.

Sure enough, presentation #4 was Alex Steffen's and he tells a tale of marketing his organization's book. The video is a little rough and it takes awhile to get to the fourth talk, so I've extracted the audio channel for those who like immediate gratification.

The gist of the matter is that Amazon's algorithm for sales rank includes all pre-orders as part of the first day's total sales. That means a significant number of pre-orders can elevate a book very, very high on the lists. Alex used social networking to organize a pre-order campaign and the result was that the book rolled out with an Amazon sales rank of 500 followed soon after by 38,000(!) copies being ordered.

Of course, this means we should run right over to Amazon and pre-order Practical Plone 3. The only problem is, the book is not yet available on Amazon. We're left with pre-ordering directly from the Publisher, our good friends at Packt.

I'm not sure how Packt-published books make it into Amazon's system, but it seems like a good idea to follow Steffen's example and pile up the pre-orders on Amazon as soon as its available. I'd appreciate hearing from someone closer to the publishing process regarding the feasibility of this strategy and when/if we might see pre-ordering available on Amazon for the new edition of Practical Plone.