Lost In The Amazon … Rankings

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

 

            Like many published authors, I’ve developed a psychological disorder known as OCA: Obsessively Checking Amazon.

            This happens when you get a book listed on Amazon.com, and find yourself waking up in the middle of the night just to check the book’s ranking. When you don’t sell many copies (that would be most writers) your entire day can be made with one sale, or broken by the precipitous ranking drop that comes after that one sale.

            My fourth book came out in May, and my wife had to use a Taser and a crowbar to pry me away from the internet before summer arrived. My rank peaked in mid-May at 68,201, which sounds pretty good until you realize that the previous February, for reasons that remain a mystery, my overall rank hit 9,093.

            Of course, that counts only Amazon sales, as opposed to sales from other sources. I keep a box full of books in the trunk of my car, just in case I stumble across an unwary victim—ahem, reader—with a few bucks for books.

           

( The other thing is that Amazon rankings aren’t determined by just the number of copies sold. There’s the question of velocity … in theory, if I sold two books in an hour I might get a higher ranking than if I sold one book a week for a month. There are other factors, which are very mystical and may or may not involve a bearded wizard manning a supercomputer. )