The Author, The Addiction and the Amazon.com Ranking System
Posted on October 24, 2006
Lyn Gardner, theatre critic for The Guardian (U.K) has just published her first novel, an adventure story for the 8-12 set. Being published has led to a terrible addiction to checking her book's Amazon.com rankings. She blogs about the addiction that seems to take over the lives of so many new authors.
A friend rings and tells me that my novel Into the Woods (David Fickling Books) is at 2,993 in the Amazon rankings. This is like offering crack cocaine to a recovering drug addict. I have been trying to wean myself off my obsession with the Amazon rankings. I'm not quite ready to go cold turkey, but I am desperately trying to limit myself to just one hit a day.Into the Woods is currently available from Amazon UK. It will be released in the United States in June, 2007. But why not give the author a thrill and pre-order a copy from Amazon.com in the U.S.?Why are we first-time authors so obsessed with the Amazon rankings? Partly because, like pretending to do your tax return or essential research, it offers yet another displacement activity to avoid the real hard business of writing. But it's also because once your book is out there, all alone in the big wide world, you desperately want to know if it's thriving or has got completely lost - and for a considerable period nobody can tell you.
The Amazon rankings are something to cling to, even though you know in your heart and head that they are both meaningless and psychologically damaging - unless you are a consistent bestseller like Jacqueline Wilson or God. (I have taken ridiculous and entirely childish comfort from the fact that that while the King James Bible sits many thousands of places above Into the Woods in the rankings, it only has an average 4.5-star customer review rating, while my novel has five).
In fact an Amazon ranking pretty well tells you nothing at all unless you are an Amazon sales executive or the kind of person who, when logging on with the intention of buying Into the Woods suddenly decides that The Institute of Electrical Engineers On Site Guide (BS7671: 2001 16th Edition Wiring Regulations Including Amendment 2: 2002) might be a far better read because it sits at number 69 in the top 100. I suppose for some readers there is probably a perceived safety in numbers.