InfoGraphic: Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" outselling nearest competitors by over five to one on Amazon

Do a search on Amazon for books on advertising, and it's no surprise that Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" shows up first. It's been a smash hit for quite some time now - around ten years and counting.

The premise that a well considered and precise action can induce desirable effects far in excess of the initial "push" is clearly an infectious one in itself.

Ok, so the book is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Neat. But I wanted to see exactly how it stacks up against other top advertising books.

Continuing in my series of posts about leading books in various business related disciplines, such as entrepreneurs and small business (InfoGraphic: "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries sells its way to small business and entrepreneurial success) and marketing (InfoGraphic: Guy Kawasaki's "Art of the start" outsells other titles by marketing gurus), I thought advertising would be appropriate to follow on with.

The titles tracked in this advertising book sales smack-down are:

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries
• Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising by Luke Sullivan
• Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpin
• Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective by George Belch

I should point out that, as you can see from the graph (provided courtesy of RankTracer - Amazon sales analytics and market research), only a few days' worth of sales data have been built up. Ok; so this isn't statistically long enough to call an outright winner.

However, I should point out that the outright best performer over these two randomly selected days is over ten years old. It's unlikely therefore that "The Tipping Point" is experiencing a localized sales spike. Just in case, I'll follow up in a few months once RankTracer has had time to build up a bit more data.

Now to the data. Click on the graph to expand it and view the sales statistics for January 21st, 2012 to January 23rd, 2012. You'll see that:

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference: 277 sales at an average sales rank of 87
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: 13 sales at an average sales rank of 5209
• Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Advertising: 18 sales at an average sales rank of 3920
• Likeable Social Media: 48 sales at an average sales rank of 1385
• Advertising and Promotion: An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective: 27 sales at an average sales rank of 3500

I should point out that while the sales figures for "The Tipping Point" completely overwhelm the other titles, they are in fact doing very well. "Likeable Social Media", for example, weighs in with a very respectable 48 sales over two days. That's not shabby - it's also got a 5 star average out of 152 customer reviews. This is a seriously good performance by anyone's standard.

Is there a social media correlation to book sales?

As always, I try to see if there is a social, or online metric that we can use to see whether or not an author's online reach plays a role in the online sales performance of their books. Here are the stats on our stable of authors:

• Malcolm Gladwell: 32224 twitter followers; included in 94 Google+ circles
• Al Ries: NA twitter followers; included in 9 Google+ circles
• Luke Sullivan: 12598 twitter followers; included in NA Google+ circles
• Dave Kerpen: 15406 twitter followers; included in 1924 Google+ circles
• George Belch: NA twitter followers; included in NA Google+ circles

The answer here is almost certainly an emphatic no. Of the small business/entrepreneur, marketing, and advertising crowds, this one (advertising) has by far the least social media engagement. Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Kerpen have respectable online followings, but nothing even approaching the social reach of Guy Kawasaki or any of the marketing gurus profiled.

It seems advertisers prefer more traditional methods of marketing and publishing - surprising to me since I would have thought advertisers like to stay on the bleeding edge.

It's unlikely that "The Tipping Point" generated its sales through online media and marketing. Aside from the publishers, where do you think the book garnered its success? Word of mouth? Share your thoughts in the comments below or reply on Twitter and Google+.

If you'd like to do some of your own market research on any products sold via Amazon, head on over to RankTracer and purchase a few subscriptions to track those products. Feel free to share your results here in the comments.

You can also request a title of interest to be included in future smack-downs. Follow me on Twitter or Google+ and make a request.