Dog Physics: More Popular Than London Call Girls

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

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.