Matthew and I have been informed by our editor that they’re printing another 4000 copies of The Government Manual for New Superheroes, on top of our original print run of 9000. Obviously, this is good news.
One of the things I never realized is how hard it is for an author to get a sense of how well his book is selling. I’ve been somewhat obsessively checking our Amazon sales rank, which has generally been hovering between 20,000 and 70,000, but I really haven’t had any way to calculate what that means. I’m glad to know we’re doing well.
And I’m also glad to see that, as of this writing, The Government Manual for New Superheroes is at 10,581 on the Amazon sales chart. At this rate, we’ll be in the top 10,000 in no time.
I’m telling you, Jacob: Amazon’s sales rank feature is like the darkness control knob on your toaster. It’s not actually hooked up to anything. It is a random-number generator. Still, it’d be nice if said generator randomly spit out a number like “17,” or “8.”
As of this writing, our rank is 27,849. In an hour, it’ll be 82,497. Then 29,784 in the morning. Also, I think the initial print run of our book was 10,000. I recall something about 9,100 being shipped to resellers.
Naysaying the numbers,
mdb
My guess (as a statistician) is that the rankings of books higher than, say, 10,000 is very unstable and essentially random. For example, it’s not clear to me how they break ties. What if your book is tied at 27,849 with “1-2-3 be a Porn Star”? Amazon is probably keeping that algorithm a secret.