It's All About Data...

I keep track of all of my book sales. I have this massive spreadsheet that I have kept now for 10-years. You see, having a science background, I like data. As a kid, I would set up football leagues and play all the games using a dice. I would then spend hours calculating the league table with goal for and against averages - the works. I also used to keep track of every song I heard played on the radio and issue a weekly chart based on that complete with full statistics. See! I love data.

The other night - as if I don’t have enough to do - I finished the book score for December and calculated total and annual sales. Unfortunately, book sales were well down last year - not sure whether that is just for me or a general trend or both but I know others have seen the same thing. Audiobook sales in particular seem to have collapsed. However, I was somewhat surprised to discover that my black-eyed kid book is now my all-time best seller! Chilling Tales of Black Eyed Kids has now sold over 2830 books and surpassed my previous best seller - Your Haunted Lives - which has sold 2700. Now, those numbers may not seem like many to you - the reader - but trust me - that’s not bad numbers for self-published books. I’m pleased. In total, my books have sold over 24,000 copies. Now, that number does not include my business books as I never tracked them as I really wasn’t able to for a variety of reasons. I imagine you can add 1000 more however.

Here is a video about that book…

For me, its fun to see and analyse the data to see the trends. My paranormal books sell ten times more than my magic books and they sell ten times more than poetry - as an example. Trying to determine what makes a book more successful though is more troublesome. How do you measure the selling value of a good cover? It seems that there is a huge element of luck involved to be honest. Some books take off while better ones die.

When my boys were young, I always kept the statistics for the sports they played. Little League football, hockey and so on. I have folders on this machine with some of those spreadsheets complete with things like passing yards, receiving yards, rushing yards for kids who I have long forgotten on the teams my son’s played on.

I guess the question we have to ask is am I well that I enjoy collecting and analysing data?

My PhD work added a whole bunch of advanced statistics too as I collected hundreds of fossil shells and then measured multiple directions on each. I then converted them into ratios over shell length to help eliminate growth factors and plotted them using principal component analysis. This way, I was able to show a pictoral representation of variability within varieties and species and even use it as a way to identify and define new varieties. By adding grain size and color of the hosting sediment, I was able to study shell shape variation with respect to the environment that they lived in. See! I love doing stuff like that. If you want to see an example - google ‘Vasey & Bowes’ and you will find a paper published decades ago in the Geological Society of London’s journal showing some results of this. Add in the term ‘bivalves’ and you’ll be sure to find it.

Data is often the key to creating ideas and hypotheses. Which is why I reject quite a lot of the climate scare science in which they find reasons to modify the data to suit their idea. That’s not science. That’s politics and religion. They also collect data in biased ways looking for a particular result - ie collecting temperature data in locations where there is a strong warming trend due to a change in use of the location - for example, an airport weather monitoring station that is now next to an air vent from a heated building. Data is easily manipulated. And trust me - many so-called scientists will do that to support a current theory if it means they get money, recognition and support. Science is as corrupt as politics these days I think.

Have a great weekend.