InfoGraphic: "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries sells its way to small business and entrepreneurial success

Entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses clearly have money to spend when it comes to educating themselves with content and knowledge from leading entrepreneurs like Eric Ries, Crystal Paine and Napoleon Hill.

In my previous article in which I compared the leading titles by marketing gurus, entitled "InfoGraphic: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the start" outsells other titles by marketing gurus", Guy's book outsold its competitors three to one over a five day period, selling an average of about 60 copies a day. The story is different when it comes to starting and running a business.

To be honest I was slightly surprised when I saw the figures in this comparison graph. It was my opinion, as an entrepreneur, that marketing products and services was more "sexy" than the day to day tasks of running a business or managing money. Clearly I was mistaken.

Before I get into the sales facts and figures of the books compared in this graph (provided courtesy of RankTracer - Amazon sales analytics and market research), it's important to note that while the books compared here share a small business or entrepreneurial theme, they are not necessarily direct competitors.

The books themselves are also positioned differently, and have different sizes and costs. Bearing that in mind, let's take a look. The titles tracked are:

• The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms by Danielle LaPorte
• The Money Saving Mom's Budget: Slash Your Spending, Pay Down Your Debt, Streamline Your Life, and Save Thousands a Year by Crystal Paine
• eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income by Steve Weber
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

The graph (click to expand) shows the sales rank and sales figures for each of these books from the 15th of Jan to the 21st of Jan:

• The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms: 44 sales at an average sales rank of 9513
• The Money Saving Mom's Budget: Slash Your Spending, Pay Down Your Debt, Streamline Your Life, and Save Thousands a Year: 529 sales at an average sales rank of 370
• eBay 101: Selling on eBay For Part-time or Full-time Income: 38 sales at an average sales rank of 12724
• The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses: 772 sales at an average sales rank of 183
• Think and Grow Rich: 301 sales at an average sales rank of 570

These are stupendous figures. In particular, Eric Ries' title is like a small business and entrepreneur's de facto guide. Eric and the two other high selling titles, The Money Saving Mom's Budget and Think and Grow Rich, are selling more in one day than most of the marketing books I compared in InfoGraphic: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the start" outsells other titles by marketing gurus sell in a week.

Is there a correlation between small business book sales and social reach?

As it turned out in the marketing book smackdown, Guy Kawasaki's social reach was substantially greater than his peers, and his book was selling with a strong correlation to this social reach.

Here are how our small business and entrepreneurs stack up on the social scene:

• Danielle LaPorte: 25205 twitter followers; included in 658 Google+ circles
• Crystal Paine: 88545 twitter followers; included in NA Google+ circles
• Steve Weber: 22456 twitter followers; included in NA Google+ circles
• Eric Ries: 43805 twitter followers; included in 9967 Google+ circles
• Napoleon Hill: 6203 twitter followers; included in NA Google+ circles

Again, I'm completely stunned by these results. While the marketers have massive social media engagement, relatively speaking, our business gurus and entrepreneurs have very little. In some cases, our authors here had no Google+ account at all - at least none that I could find.

What does this say about how they market their books? What does it say about the value of social media when you can sell five times as many books with a tenth of the social media engagement? Where and how are they generating their sales?

My suspicion is that the book publishers themselves are responsible for driving sales for these authors - a more traditional model of book publishing. I'd like to hear from you, what you think is happening - you can comment below or reply to my tweets and shares on Digg or Google+?

I didn't necessarily think that social media and sales would always correlate, but I expected a vague correlation. These results seem to indicate that success is still readily available (selling products online) without requiring the use of a social media marketing campaign.

P.S: If you'd like to see a comparison of other books or products (it could be anything), connect with me and let me know. Alternatively, you can create your own infographic by creating an account on RankTracer and purchasing a few subscriptions to track different books and products for comparison.