Free tool for getting data and making graphs

I recently put a book on sale and paid for an ad campaign. Since I'm a software engineer in my day job, I was eager to explore the data after the ad ran, to see if I had good return on investment (ROI). I wanted to answer questions like:

• What percentage of sales came from each major e-book retailer?
• Did other books in the same series sell?
• How many books were downloaded from Amazon each day?

Happily, I know of a great tool to help me find answers--and it's free! The tool is called SAS Graphics Accelerator®. It's a Chrome plug-in with a lot of amazing features. I can:

• create data in the tool (by including CSV files or typing the data in manually)
• extract data from web pages by "scraping" them
• create all kinds of graphs, like bar charts, line plots, and pie charts
• share those graphs with others

The Accelerator is designed to help the visually-impaired (VI) to explore graphics, but sighted users can benefit, too. Each time you request a graph, it is produced twice:

• the typical visual way--the visualization view
• through sound--the sonification view--so that VI users can "hear" the graph

Let me show you what you can do!


Here's my first example--a time-series plot to discover how many book units per day were downloaded in the first half of January. I requested a CSV file of sales data from Amazon, imported it into the Accelerator, and generated this graph. It took me 5 minutes of clock time--start to finish.






This second example isn't about my book sales. It just demonstrates how to scrape data, in this case, about Major League Baseball. I found a wikipedia page that has data on the Home Run Derby. I asked the Accelerator to extract the data from a table about TV viewership--then generated a bar chart of the number of viewers per year. This graph only took 3 minutes from curiosity to answer. (Note: simple HTML tables can have their data extracted, but complex ones might not. You are warned if the data cannot be extracted.)


So, if you're ever interested in exploring data and want a free, fun, easy graphics tool to help, check out the Graphics Accelerator.


Disclaimer: This tool is provided by SAS--my day job employer. But I'm not trying to sell you something--because free!

Fun with numbers and graphs - part 1

Recently, I've had the opportunity to combine my day job as a software engineer with my night job as an author.  I used my programming skills--with some help from Robert A., a graphics expert--to analyze how well my I WISH series was selling after I paid for a promotion from Bookbub (a company that provides e-book promos for authors.)

As you'll see in the graph below, the pertinent dates to remember are:

• January / February 2016: the sales for I Wish and Wishing for You were languishing
• March 9: the Bookbub promotion ran with I Wish discounted to $0.99
• March 14: I returned I Wish to its regular price of $2.99 

So my primary interest was to discover: what effect did the promotion have on my book sales? 

To begin, I collected sales data from Amazon, B&N, Apple, and several other e-tailers. Then I ran some analysis on the data and produced a set of graphs to visualize what happened.

In the graph below, I've plotted unit sales for six weeks before the promotion as well as six weeks after.

1. The first red arrow on the graph marks the day that the promotion ran.
2. The second red arrow highlights when the book returned to regular price.

On promo day, there is an expected spike in unit sales. Over the five days following the promotion, the unit sales decline, but they are still much higher than before the promo. But the interesting--and unexpected--result is that the higher sales of I Wish continued after I set the price back to normal.

But there is an even happier conclusion we can see in the above graph. Unit sales through May 1st never dip to the pre-promotion levels--a result that has remained true until this day.

This second graph represents the effect that the I WISH promo had on its sequel, Wishing for You. Note that the sequel remained at regular price throughout the promotion period.

The first red arrow shows promo day. There is a mild spike that lasts for several days before going into a slight decline.

Approximately two weeks after the promotion, we see a new spike! As an author, I hope that the second spike means they've read book 1 and enjoyed it enough to buy the sequel.

After the second spike, sales remain somewhat sporadic, but still higher than before the promotion. Just as I experienced with I Wish, I can confirm that the unit sales of the sequel remain higher even 4 months after promo day!

 
Moral of these graphs: I have been delighted with the results of this promotion. The Bookbub ad created an expected spike in unit sales during the promotion period. Since then, unit sales for Book 1 as well as its sequel have been consistently higher than before the promotion. I am a satisfied Bookbub customer!