2015-03-19

Right now, the book is #6 on the New York Times best-seller list in hardcover nonfiction, and #13 in combined print and e-book nonfiction. This is the March 22 list, and covers sales from the first week of March. The March 29 list -- covering sales from the second week of March -- is not yet on the Internet. On that list, I'm #11 on the hardcover nonfiction list, and not at all on the combined print and e-book nonfiction list.

Marc Rotenberg of EPIC tells me that Vance Packard's The Naked Society made it to #7 on the list during the week of July 12, 1964, and -- by that measure -- Data and Goliath is the most popular privacy book of all time. I'm not sure I can claim that honor yet, but it's a nice thought. And two weeks on the New York Times best-seller list is super fantastic.

For those curious to know what sorts of raw numbers translate into those rankings, this is what I know. Nielsen Bookscan tracks retail sales across the US, and captures about 80% of the book market. It reports that my book sold 4,706 copies during the first week of March, and 2,339 copies in the second week. Taking that 80% figure, that means I sold 6,000 copies the first week and 3,000 the second.

My publisher tells me that Amazon sold 650 hardcovers and 600 e-books during the first week, and 400 hardcovers and 500 e-books during the second week. The hardcover sales ranking was 865, 949, 611, 686, 657, 602, 595 during the first week, and 398, 511, 693, 867, 341, 357, 343 during the second. The book's rankings during those first few days don't match sales, because Amazon records a sale for the rankings when a person orders a book, but only counts the sale when it actually ships it. So all of my preorders sold on that first day, even though they were calculated in the rankings during the days and weeks before publication date.

There are few new book reviews. There's one from the Dealbook blog at the New York Times that treats the book very seriously, but doesn't agree with my conclusions. (A rebuttal to that review is here.) A review from the Wall Street Journal was even less kind. This review from InfoWorld is much more positive.

All of this, and more, is on the book's website.

There are several book-related videos online. The first is the talk I gave at the Harvard Bookstore on March 4th. The second and third are interviews of me on Democracy Now. I also did a more general Q&A with Gizmodo.

Note to readers. The book is 80,000 words long, which is a normal length for a book like this. But the book's size is much larger, because it contains a lot of references. They're not numbered, but if they were, there would be over 1,000 numbers. I counted all the links, and there are 1,622 individual citations. That's a lot of text. This means that if you're reading the book on paper, the narrative ends on page 238, even though the book continues to page 364. If you're reading it on the Kindle, you'll finish the book when the Kindle says you're only 44% of the way through. The difference between pages and percentages is because the references are set in smaller type than the body. I warn you of this now, so you know what to expect. It always annoys me that the Kindle calculates percent done from the end of the file, not the end of the book.

And if you've read the book, please post a review on the book's Amazon page or on Goodreads. Reviews are important on those sites, and I need more of them.

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