DeepWork_0816August was big month for book-inspired posts including Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World which jumped to the top of our charts due to this post. This month we also riffed on the ideas in Chuck Klosterman’s But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. We also posted Three proven steps to instant alpha based on the ideas in Robert Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.

For more book ideas you can check out our post compiling our many book links as well as last month’s best-selling list. We present sales two ways: the first is by unit sales and the second way is by revenue which can be notably different. Here are the books (combined print and Kindle* that Abnormal Returns readers purchased at Amazon during August 2016:

The Top 10 (by Unit Sales)

  1. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
  2. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tile the Odds In Your Favor by Spencer Jakab
  3. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
  4. So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund: Lessons for Managers and Allocators by Ted Seides
  5. Jesse Livermore – Boy Plunger: The Man Who Sold America Short in 1929 by Tom Rubython
  6. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
  7. Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert Frank
  8. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
  9. Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud by David Dayen
  10. Common Stocks and Common Sense: The Strategies, Analyses, Decisions, and Emotions of a Particularly Successful Value Investor by Edgar Wachenheim III

The Top 10 (by Revenue)

  1. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
  2. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tile the Odds In Your Favor by Spencer Jakab
  3. So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund: Lessons for Managers and Allocators by Ted Seides
  4. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
  5. Jesse Livermore – Boy Plunger: The Man Who Sold America Short in 1929 by Tom Rubython
  6. Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez
  7. Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert Frank
  8. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
  9. Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud by David Dayen
  10. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths

Thanks again to everyone who purchased a copy of my book or any other book (or item) during the month. Mid-month look for our monthly post summing up all of our book-related links as well.