A big spike for The Big Switch
We saw an amazing spike in the Bookscan sales data for Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch (a business book about the switch to utility or cloud computing) this past week.
We were curious about this huge jump. We see some recent activity in the blogosphere, but nothing jumps out at us as driving this spike. Perhaps there was a publisher promotion? But if anyone knows of recent internet activity that could have driven a spike of this magnitude, we'd love to learn about it. (We're always interested in learning about online sources that drive book sales :-)
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Comments: 7
[03.05.08 05:03 PM]
We've also seen a huge spike in interesting our "cloud platform" Enomalism this week. Good thing we're using EC2 to handle this type of sudden surge. It seems that Google is behind our cloud platform interest spike from what we can tell. A microsoft mention on their blog also helped :)
[03.05.08 06:04 PM]
Pretty much maps to a solid review in USA Today on the 25th of February.
'World Wide Computer' is on horizon - USATODAY.com
That would pretty much do it. Remember that USA Today goes to pretty much every middle manager on the road via the space just outside their door in the hotel.
You've also got a big Google guy touting it a couple of days later in a keynote:
Google Watch - OpenSocial - Google's Glazer Touts Carr, Cloud Graphing Social Patterns West 2008
The lengthening tail from these tales would be more than enough to account for the rise. Watch over the next week and see if it slumps off.
Of course, having O'Reilly ask about it will pop sales as well.
[03.05.08 06:33 PM]
This book was mentioned in one of the morning sessions at the Graphing Social Patterns event in San Diego on Tuesday 03/04/08. I personally wrote down the name and was going to check it out.
[03.05.08 06:46 PM]
Couldn't a single big bulk buy (for a conference Nick was speaking at, for instance) account for that? I've done that (get paid in kind for a speech while I'm launching a book) in the past, and just one or two big conferences could account for the 2k or so books that appears to be. Does Bookscan count bulk sales from, say, 800-CEO-Reads?
[03.06.08 04:10 AM]
I must admit, I had not heard about this book until a few days ago - about the underlying idea yes, but not about the book.
Then I stumbled over 2 or 3 news/blog entries related to Carr talking about Microsoft's new Data Centre initiatve...
See for example here: http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/03/microsoft_data_center_blowout/
The timing is close enough that this may have been the trigger of the increasing sales...
[03.06.08 06:32 AM]
It probably has a little to do with it being a rather good book. I'm still ticked at myself for not getting a timely review written off my advance copy, but it didn't really fit into my year.
[03.06.08 02:00 PM]
Didn't you see me on Oprah?
Nick
