Art of the Start Outsells Other Marketing Titles

I thought I would compare the online sales of the marketing books written by a random selection of leading marketing gurus to see how they stack up against each other.

Now I should point out that making too direct comparisons on the relative popularity of each book is not quite fair because the books were published at different times, and are different sizes and prices.

The titles tracked for this marketing book sales analysis smack down are:

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything by Guy Kawasaki

Engage!: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web by Brian Solis

That notwithstanding, it's interesting to see who's books are walking the walk when it comes to cold hard sales. The attached graph (provided courtesy of RankTracer Amazon Sales & Market Research), shows a comparison of Amazon sales ranks over the last five days on Amazon.com - click on it to expand to full size. The higher the sales rank, the less the book is selling. In other words, a sales rank of 1 means that book is the best selling book on Amazon.

At the bottom of the graph you'll notice that the actual sales estimates for each book over this period are given along with the average sales rank over this time:

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything:

Engage!: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web:

is outselling his marketing guru peers by some margin - in fact, 3 to 1 over his nearest competitor, Seth godin's

was published in 2004, while the other books were all published in 2010 or 2011. Not only that, but

is also one of the more expensive books, weighing in at around $18.

Now it's quite possible that Guy has just been on Oprah, or something similar, leading to a temporary spike in his sales over this last week. But kudos to him either way - it's not easy to have an eight year old book frequent the top 1000 books on a regular basis.

Of course, there are plenty of other marketing books by other marketing gurus to compare. For example Google+ for business by Chris Brogan, not included in this graph, weighed in with a respectable

While a few days of book sales data is probably not sufficient to really get a handle on who's winning the marketing book marketing competition, it's worth taking a look at what type of social reach each of the authors have garnered for themselves.

I won't draw any conclusions but here are the social reach stats for each author for you to look at anyway:

Alright, so those are all pretty big numbers, but it's interesting to note that Guy has a substantially greater social reach with almost two and a half times as many Twitter followers as his nearest competitor, Chris Brogan. He also has a staggering

times the amount of Google+ engagement as his nearest competitor on Google+, Seth Godin.

So there you have it. I won't make any deductions about why Guy's marketing book sold more than Seth's, Brian's, and Chris' combined over the last 5 days, simply because it's not a sufficient length of time to make too meaningful deductions. However, all these titles are tracked on RankTracer for the next 3 months so I'll follow up towards the end of the tracking period.

Next on the chopping block will be small business and entrepreneur titles like The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and eBay 101 by Steve Webber.