As noted in a previous post, Breakfast with Einstein was featured in a book review in the New York Times. This was, obviously, a pretty exciting development for me; it’s also a chance to poke at numbers a bit and get a sense of the power of different kinds of media.

The screen shot above is from Amazon’s “Author Central” service, and shows the Amazon sales rank for Breakfast with Einstein over the last month. This is an imperfect measure of sales, but one that’s immediately available (they also provide real-ish sales numbers from BookScan, but those have a delay of at least a week).

Immediately after release, the book shot up to a pretty respectable Sales Rank in the low five digits (I think the peak was around 11,000, but it was between 10,000 and 20,000 for most of December). Since then, it dropped off, as naturally happens, and was bouncing around between 50,000 and 100,000 for the last few weeks.

The NYT review went live online on Tuesday, probably because it’s a review of three science books, and that synched up with the “Science Times” section on Tuesday. As you can see in the graph, this immediately sent the Sales Rank back up to near its release-week peak, in the 10,000-15,000 range. I thought that was pretty nice.

That was more or less what I was expecting. I was not, however, expecting the next jump, which started on Saturday, when I checked in and was surprised to find the Sales Rank in the 5,000 range. On Sunday, it rocketed up into the three-digit range, peaking at 517 according to the Amazon tracker. It stayed above 1,000 for about a day, and has dropped back into the low four digits now.

This, of course, reflects the fact that the review was in the Sunday Book Review section, and those Sunday supplements are often distributed on Saturday afternoon. And the huge peak lines up with people getting the Sunday paper on, you know, Sunday. It probably didn’t hurt that, as noted on Twitter the review was teased on page A3.

This is, obviously, very nice from a selling-books-to-people standpoint; it’s also a nice reminder of the enormous scale and reach of the New York Times. For all that people bang on about “legacy media” and the death of newspapers at the hands of the Web and social media and all that, the review in the Sunday print edition was vastly more effective than the exact same review posted online on Tuesday, which in turn was all by itself as effective as everything we did to hype the book around its launch date.

(There’s probably also a comparison to be made between the effect of the Sunday Book Review and a review in the Science Times, which How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog got back in 2012. I’ll wait until the BookScan sales numbers are in to do that, though…)

Anyway, it’s been a fun week here, as you can probably tell…