Ok, I have a confession to make. My name is Patrick Rothfuss, and I am addicted to Amazon.com.
Not for the reason you might think, while I do use Amazon to occasionally pick up cheap DVD sets and hard to find out-of-print stuff, I actually do most of my book buying from the local independent bookstore. It’s hard walking away from Amazon’s sexy, cheap books, but I feel better about shopping locally. I know the money is staying in the community.
No, I’m addicted to Amazon for another reason entirely: the Amazon Sales Rank.
For those of you who don’t know about it. The sales rank is how well your book is selling on Amazon compared to all the other books. As I write this, I can see my rank is at #1224 among all books. A very respectable ranking, especially considering that I’m a new author.
What you might not realize is that authors don’t have any way of finding out how well their books are selling. We can read reviews and take guesses, but for the most part, we don’t have access to any real factual information about how well are books are selling. Every six months we get a royalty statement and that’s about it.
What we do have is the Amazon sales rank. You want to know the maddening thing? It updates, like, every 15 minutes or so. That means that I am fucking compelled to keep a Firefox instance open to my book’s Amazon page ALL THE TIME. Then, no matter what I’m doing, I can hop over and click refresh. Again, and again, and again. Just to see if it’s changed.
Ooh. Now I’m at 1028! Someone must have bought a book! Maybe two! I am a tiny god!
Because I’m constantly refreshing on Amazon, I’ve also developed a secondary addiction to the Amazon reviews.
Generally speaking, the reviews have been good. People like the book, and they have been generous with their praise. Every time I saw another 5-star review I got a warm fuzzy, and for several months, I was powerfully proud of my unbroken 5-star average. Then a few people gave it 1-star reviews and my average dropped to 4.5 stars, causing a great wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part.
Still at 1028.
As a whole, I respect the concept behind the Amazon reviews. They’re like true democracy in action, everyone gets to chime in and let their voice be heard. PHD in English literature? You get 1 review. Fourteen year old boy who loves Nascar? 1 review. Benobo chimp addicted to methadone? Assuming you have a credit card, you get a review too.
Still 1028. Maybe it doesn’t update every 15 minutes.
While I respect the egalitarian nature of the Amazon reviews, it does tend to occasionally remind me how really low the lowest common denominator really is. A couple days ago some choad posted up a 1 star review because the book was 900 pages (which it isn’t) and because he’ll have to wait for book two to come out. I can respect a bad review if the person makes a few salient points, but my suspicion is that this guy hasn’t even read the book.
Nooo! I’m at 1375 now. I suck. The Karma gods are punishing me for defaming some poor anonymous reviewer’s character. And perhaps for the gratuitous use of the word ‘choad.’
Okay. Another confession. I just bought a copy of my own book to see if it would make the Amazon rank go back up. It didn’t (I expect there must be a delay.) But when I made my order, I saw that right now they’re selling my book for less than fifteen bucks. How cool is that? I’m all about shopping locally, but 40% off is a significant chunk of money…. Maybe I should buy a few more… Is it tacky to give away your own book as a Christmas gift?
Okay, I’ve rambled long enough. I should get back to revisions of book two….
Later,
pat
P.S. Still 1375.
Edit:
P.P.S. In the comments below, RoseNeko posted a link to an article so perfectly relevant to this that I wanted to LINK IT HERE for all of you to see. Bless you Neko, and the person who wrote this article. Maybe now I can start letting my obsession go.
Y’know… using ‘P.S.’ Doesn’t make much sense anymore. For one, it was a convention that came about when you wrote letters longhand, so the P.S. was necessary in case you left something out. Nowadays there’s no reason to leave anything out. Since I’m typing everything out, I could just go back and add it into the original post.
What’s more. P.S. stood for ‘post script.’ But I’m not scripting anything, I’m posting a blog. So really, it should be P.P. for ‘post post.’
But somehow I don’t think that’s going to catch on…
P.P.P.S. 1087
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