Intervention
I think I need an intervention.
I was told that a lot of new authors get addicted to checking their rating on Amazon, which you can find under “Product Details” on the book page, but I didn’t think it would happen to me.
Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I did. But even so, I didn’t think I would become enslaved to it, as I have. #10 in fantasy just now, and I broke into the top 100 bestsellers in straight fiction at #96!
Did you know that the Amazon sales rank updates every hour? I didn’t, but I sure do now. I also know it doesn’t happen right on the hour. No, you have to wait until like 7 minutes past before you can hit “refresh” and get your fix.
I shouldn’t know that. No one should. It’s funny how checking my rank makes me feel like a winner and a total loser at the same time.
In other news, I had a chance at my signing to meet Liz, a friend of my biggest fan in South Africa (or the rest of Africa, for that matter), Dave-Brendon de Burgh. Liz picked up a signed copy for Dave, and snagged one for herself while she was at it. We had a nice little chat, though I was nervous at my first signing and probably came off sounding like I was high. Liz is a real book lover, and maintains a very enjoyable blog called My Favorite Books.
Anyway, Liz sent me a message the other day telling me that she was so involved in reading The Painted Man that she missed her train stop. Really, there are few greater compliments. I mentioned that I missed my stop many times while writing it!
Liz wrote a glowing review on her blog, which you can see here.
Thanks, Liz!
Liz is gonna be so stoked to see this! 🙂
And don’t worry, Peter, you don’t need an intervention, you just need to get used to it. 🙂 If you think you’re checking sales now, you’re gonna go nuts when the sales for The Desert Spear jump through the stratosphere. 🙂
Thanks so much for the pimpage – it is genuinely a fantastic book. I can’t wait for it to become HUGE so that Dave-Brendan and I can sit back like old-timers and nod knowingly going: yeah, see, back in the day, we predicated this….
Liz
Hehe definately. 🙂 But then Peter goes, ‘Ah, but wait, there’s more to come!’ 🙂
I bet *every* new writer goes through this. AJ Jacobs writes about obsessively checking his amazon.com sales rankings in “The Year of Living Biblically.” If any other novelists are reading this, I pray that you provide some perspective.
I’m sure you could give Dr.Drew a call.
Should I know who Dr. Drew is?
Well, I can’t speak for you; but I find myself checking the #s so obsessively because they’re just so danged good, and it brings a smile to my face every hour when I check. I was smiling a week ago when they were “just” in/around #1362. I smile more now when they’re likely as not to be 1000 points higher. I could be smiling at this for a long time. The hard part will be letting go of that urge to refresh when the smiling’s stopped, and we’ll both have to deal with that at some point. Let’s hope not for a while.
You could look up Celebrity Rehab on Wikipedia and it will tell you exactly who he is.
Just finished the book having reviewed it for the UK Amazon Vine program; it’s easily the best thing I’ve got from them and I’m feverishly awaiting the next one!
Incidentally there is a flipside to Amazon rankings; us reviewers check in every now and then to see how many helpful marks they have… sad I know… Great book, well done.