[charlesatan]

via http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/3...y-a-case-study

One of the major takeaways of our research is that book discovery happens in a multitude of ways, and there is no single magic bullet that will work for every book. But that doesn't mean there aren't best practices. Here is a case study of how one book reached the promised land of the New York Times best-seller list: Goodreads Author Charles Duhigg's nonfiction book, The Power of Habit.


Where on Goodreads did people discover The Power of Habit? The above graph shows what part of the site readers were browsing when they added the book. A few months before publication, most people found The Power of Habit through an advance copy giveaway (note the three spikes corresponding with the giveaway dates). Pre-publication giveaways hope to generate early buzz and seed the book page with a good number of reviews, which are crucial in helping future readers decide to add the book. The orange section of the graph shows people who added the book after seeing one of their friends add it. Notice how this starts to swell as more and more people search for the book. This is the word-of-mouth excitement that publishers and authors covet.