content driven demand visualization (1)

Content-Driven Demand Visualizationfred@PageKicker.com

Demand Visualization Today

In book publishing, demand visualization is usually top-down and driven by simple metadata such as publisher, author, BISAC category, number of titles

Top-down demand visualization

# titles by quarter, sales by month

Heat maps by book category

Pretty much the state of the art, as far as I know

What if ...

we try a bottom-up approach?

create a sales-weighted text corpus ~=full text of each book * its sales & visualize that

Simple example

Title A, “Naval Force Structure”: 25%Title B, “Gunboat Diplomacy in the South China Sea”: 75%

Sales-weighted content visualization

Five books from O’Reilly with hypothetical sales

Title Percentage of total sales

R Cookbook 10%

Statistics in a Nutshell 20%

Data Science for Business 30%

Python for Kids 30%

Bad Data Handbook 10%

Sales-weighted content visualizationIn this corpus, content related to examples, variables, values, models, and functions seems to be favored on a sales-weighted basis

Is this useful?

● Maybe with a lot of additional work, more data and more sophisticated analytics

● It is novel so maybe worth exploring● Similar to e-book reader data gathering● Big picture: arguably, bottom-up demand

analysis is the wave of the future for publishing