Dog Physics: More Popular Than London Call Girls

A correspondent from the UK sends along this picture from the Waterstones outlet in Heathrow airport:

i-3fbc92b059e0cf1dc6e9177501ee14ee-heathrow_rack.jpg

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 the future about the sales numbers for that, because Amazon now makes BookScan numbers available, while Simon & Schuster make point-of-sale numbers available, giving me a nice way to test BookScan's claim to capture 75% of all sales.

And, of course, you might've heard somewhere that How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog will be released soon-- next Tuesday, to be precise (but who's obsessively counting days to that, anyway?). They were selling it at the AAAS meeting last week, and I heard that a very well-known physicist picked one up, which is cool. I know how many they shipped to stores, both here and in the UK, which is fairly substantial, so it should really be available "wherever books are sold," as the phrase goes. And there is an electronic edition, for those of you who snarkily disparage "legacy books," also on sale next Tuesday.

In terms of publicity, I've already linked most of the reviews. I'll be doing a signing at the Open Door in Schenectady on the 10th of March, and one at the B&N in Vestal, NY (closest big store to where I grew up) on the 24th. And one of the local papers, the Troy Record, just ran a five-question interview with me, though some of the responses got a little garbled (I don't have a thirteen-year-old, for example...).

And that's where things stand with the books. Which isn't a bad place to be standing, really.

More like this

One 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…
A 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…
As 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…
I had a signing yesterday at the Barnes & Noble in Vestal, NY, which drew a smallish crowd mostly of friends and family. SteelyKid came, of course, and while she spent most of her time bopping about other parts of the store, she came over to the signing area while I was signing books for people…

Congratulations! That is bizarre about your ghost 13-year-old in the Troy Record interview who âread the first book and loved it. He quotes bits of it at the dinner table.â Have you figured out where he came from?

By Margaret S. (not verified) on 22 Feb 2012 #permalink

Damn, I'm in Endicott the weekend before that. When's your book tour reaching NM?