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| Hearsay: |
I know a few of you reading this track your stats regularly at Amazon. I know some big-assed famous novelists who watch it hourly like school kids with ears pressed against the proverbial (in a Porky’s sense) wall between the locker rooms, hoping to hear their name mumbled on the other side. But perhaps you shouldn’t. I mean, besides because it wastes your life and makes you look like an idiot when people find out.
It is not uncommon to hear an author talk about Amazon rankings. Amazon is one of the few places to get a sense of how a book is doing in real time — the elaborate, drawn-out process of getting sales numbers from bookstores and back to authors is (to say the least) Byzantine.
Despite its specialization — Amazon counts only its own sales, after all — the immediacy of these rankings can be addictive. I’ve heard authors talk about tracking their status against other books or trying to gauge exactly how many places a single sale might raise their rank. It can get a bit obsessive.
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June 28th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Now that we’re out of the closet on this one, can other obsessive authors tell me how these sales rankings actually work? Why do the sales go up and down like a yo-yo? Are they updated every hour or day or what?
June 28th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I don’t know how often they calculate but I tried a few years ago to gain access to information about how they calculate for an article for this site and they basically told me it was not something they shared. It’s a secret recipe—much like the Colonel Saunders chicken batter—devised to teach writers a lesson for being so self-obsessed. I do know that it has something to do with one’s sales relative to all the other sales in one’s category, so if you buy ten books all at once of your own book, you might briefly have a high score, if, say, no one buys Harry Potter or Dan Brown’s whatever in that same calculation period. In other words, it means almost nothing, except if your agent happens to be trying to sell foreign rights to a publisher who happens to look at your sales ranking in that same period.
There was some story about an American author who was beseeching friends and family to buy his new book on-line in the first couple of days. Can’t remember who at the moment, and could never really figure out why except it might have been related to the above hypothesis. Sort of sad, if that’s how publishers choose their next emperor.