Since I became 'an author' I've really started to understand people's really personal obsession with things like tracking.
You get very little feedback on what's actually happening to your book (is anyone buying it? I've still not seen it in a bookshop) so you quickly fall back on the Amazon Sales Rank. Which is an indication of how well you're doing, but like most tracking, is at best a distant surrogate for actual achievement and is poorly understood. No-one really seems to know how Sales Rank is calculated, though various people have attempted to correlate sales with ranking and work out how many books you need to sell to get to a certain postion - but all that data is for Amazon US.
All I know is my sales rank was in the 16,000s for ages, then on the 8th it went to 2555, then on the 9th it was 1351 for a bit and then went up to 653, then on the 10th it was 1559 and now it's 7226. Not that I'm checking it every 5 minutes or anything.
I'll never disregard the importance of tracking again - you can get very invested in surrogate numbers.
Very true, 76.5 percent of people know that.
;)
Posted by: Rob Mortimer | November 11, 2005 at 06:13 PM
Russell, aren't you checking your blog statistics every morning? Before the kettle boils I check, it comes free with 'blogger'.
I'm in competition with John Griffiths who gets 4,000 hits a month.
You won't know how many books you've sold for AGES! but the ranking is really cool. I haven't bought one yet but count me in.
Posted by: Carol | November 11, 2005 at 08:57 PM
cheer up, you're n° 1197 today on .co.uk !
you'll soon get back on Amazon's 1000 most wanted.
Posted by: christian | November 14, 2005 at 11:42 AM