I'm sure everyone with a book out succumbs to the temptation sometimes, whether we're what Brian calls traditionally published, self-published, POD, small press, or whatever.
At least the numbers at amazon.co.uk stay put long enough, you have to figure that when they recalculate it actually means something ... maybe.
But at amazon.com they've had some weird system that takes how many books you've sold in the last hour (or whatever) calculates how many books that would be if you continued to sell at that rate for some arbitrary period of time, adds it to how many books you've sold already, and comes up with a figure based on that. Sell a handful of copies within an hour of each other, and you'd surge ahead of 2 million other books that didn't sell any new copies on that particular day. The next day, however, 500,000 other books would have overtaken you. You'd fallen ignominiously from 40,000th place to 540,000th.
In spite of this madness, it used to be possible to make some kind of sense of the process, just by tracking the fluctuations. If your ranking improved at all, by even the tiniest number, you knew you sold at least one copy -- a more significant improvement, maybe two or three copies. If your ranking bobbed up and down several times in the same day, you knew that your book was selling, if not fabulously well, at least steadily.
Now, however, they have added a fiendishly confusing feature, by including your ranking for the previous day. That ought to make it easier. Except for one thing: if you wrote down yesterday's numbers and compare them to what it says about yesterday today, they may or may not be the same, in fact, sometimes the numbers have no conceivable relationship to one another. There is no way to make sense of them. None.
I think it's all a plot to make writers even crazier than they are already.
At least the numbers at amazon.co.uk stay put long enough, you have to figure that when they recalculate it actually means something ... maybe.
But at amazon.com they've had some weird system that takes how many books you've sold in the last hour (or whatever) calculates how many books that would be if you continued to sell at that rate for some arbitrary period of time, adds it to how many books you've sold already, and comes up with a figure based on that. Sell a handful of copies within an hour of each other, and you'd surge ahead of 2 million other books that didn't sell any new copies on that particular day. The next day, however, 500,000 other books would have overtaken you. You'd fallen ignominiously from 40,000th place to 540,000th.
In spite of this madness, it used to be possible to make some kind of sense of the process, just by tracking the fluctuations. If your ranking improved at all, by even the tiniest number, you knew you sold at least one copy -- a more significant improvement, maybe two or three copies. If your ranking bobbed up and down several times in the same day, you knew that your book was selling, if not fabulously well, at least steadily.
Now, however, they have added a fiendishly confusing feature, by including your ranking for the previous day. That ought to make it easier. Except for one thing: if you wrote down yesterday's numbers and compare them to what it says about yesterday today, they may or may not be the same, in fact, sometimes the numbers have no conceivable relationship to one another. There is no way to make sense of them. None.
I think it's all a plot to make writers even crazier than they are already.
)
