Amazon Addictions
Being Too Geeky
Whilst idly exploring the Internet recently I rediscovered an old article from the Guardian. In this article, Jenny Colgan talked of her growing obsession with using the Amazon web site to check the sales ranking of her books.
Although at that time, my book had yet to be published, the article had struck a chord with me and I recognised that Colgan was describing a condition that I would soon be inflicted with. Sure enough, when my book was published in January 2001 I found my self constantly checking its sales rank on both the US and UK Amazon sites.
But I also took it a step further.
Being a bit of a computer geek I found myself considering writing a program which would save me the tedium of actually having to visit Amazon regularly. I designed a program which would visit Amazon, extract my book's sales ranking, and send it to my mobile phone as an SMS message. I even wrote and tested this program. To my credit, I saw sense and never actually set the program running.
The Power of Promotion
My book was pretty well received in the circles that it was aimed at. I realised, of course, that it was a very niche market and that I'd never be hitting any best seller lists. Not even computer book best seller lists as books about Word and Excel heavily outsell books about little-known programming languages. My sales rank in the few months after it was first published was usually somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 - which I thought was pretty respectable.
Then in April 2001 something strange happened. There is a web site called Slashdot which is a news and comment site for computer geeks. If something gets mentioned on Slashdot then all of geekdom knows about it. Any site mentioned in a Slashdot story had better be running on a powerful server as over the next few hours it will be getting more traffic than it has ever seen before. This is known as the Slashdot Effect and is generally seen as a bad thing as web servers have been known to give up the ghost completely under the extra strain it puts them under.
On 26th April, my book was reviewed on Slashdot. And it was a good review. Obviously this helped sales tremendously. For the next couple of days hundreds of geeks were looking for information on my book. By complete coincidence I was in New York at the time. On Friday 27th I was having dinner with my publisher. I couldn't have picked a better day to meet them. All Friday afternoon my wife and I stayed in our hotel room tracking the Amazon sales rank of the book. It leapt from about 2,500 to 200 in a couple of hours. The next time we checked it was at 135. On the Amazon's UK site it made number 85 at one point and was top of their list of computer books. My publishers were delighted. I was delighted.
Of course it only lasted a few days. It soon resumed its more accustomed position. And over the next few months it fell further. And further.
I still check the sales rank most days. Currently it hovers around 30,000 with occasional forays to 20,000.
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