It’s a fever, and Sidney Kirkpatrick and his wife, Nancy Webster-Thurlbeck, have got it — bad.
For three months, they’ve been tracking the ups and downs of the sales of Kirkpatrick’s new book, “Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet” (Riverhead), on the two major Internet bookselling sites, Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com. And, truth be told, it’s been pretty all-consuming.
Each time they boot up their personal computers and go to the Web, there, popping up immediately as their default screen, is the Amazon.com page for the biography of Cayce, an internationally known psychic who died in 1945. And midway down that page is the piece of information that means all the world to them — the Amazon.com sales rank.
When the number is low — “Edgar Cayce” once got to 12 on the list — the two of them are ecstatic. But, when it rises into the thousands, they’re glum. “You can’t help but feel a drop in the pit of your stomach,” says Kirkpatrick.
Sales rankings on Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com may not mean much to the average reader or book-buyer. What do you care whether the book you’re ordering is ranked 795,345th on the list or 78th? If you want it, you order it.
But, for authors, the sales rankings are an unprecedented new way of measuring themselves and their work against all the other writers and works out there in the marketplace. It’s a literary version of the league-leader lists in batting average or slugging percentage that the sports pages routinely carry. It’s the bestseller list extended, seemingly, to infinity.
“It becomes somewhat like when you own a stock, and you start checking the ticker every couple of hours,” says Bill Curry, a spokesman for Amazon.com.
But it’s a very personal sort of stock market since it’s the authors themselves and their works that are moving up or down on the lists.
“For a while, when my book was just published, I would check it three times a day,” says Sam Weller, the Midwest correspondent for Publishers Weekly and author of “Secret Chicago” (ECW Press), a guidebook to the city. “Every author I know checks it religiously. Every writer, whether they admit it or not, has that thing bookmarked.”
Anne Rice says she doesn’t pay much attention to the rankings for her best-selling vampire novels, but she had a different reaction when her son Christopher published his novel “A Density of Souls” (Talk Miramax Books) in August. “When I saw he was up there at number 55 in the whole country, I thought that was wonderful,” Rice says.
New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is ambivalent about the rankings, even though he checks every Wednesday to see how “The Turning Point” (Little, Brown), his solidly successful non-fiction book on epidemics in social behavior, is doing.
“I always think of advertising agencies that generate [statistics] to rate commercials,” he says. “The numbers don’t really mean anything — the research is really shoddy — but people in creative businesses need some kind of concrete number sometimes just to feel secure about what they are doing.
“Amazon does the same thing for writers. It doesn’t mean that much. But it’s the only hard number we have.”
In fact, the sales rankings at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com are extremely solid numbers, particularly in comparison to statistics generated through polls and questionnaires. Yet, few people, even within the publishing industry, are aware of what the numbers mean and how they’re produced.
The numbers are solid because they come directly from the sales data of the two bookselling services. There’s no manipulation needed; no extrapolations have to be made, no guesses, no estimates. And neither operation has a vested interest in whether one book or another is 1st or 100,000th.
At Amazon.com, more than 2 million books are ranked in a three-tier process:
– The top 10,000 books are determined based on total sales on-line at Amazon.com within the past 24 hours. And this top tier is updated every hour.
– The next 100,000 or so books on the list are determined on the basis of sales within the past 30 days. This section of the list is updated once each day.
– The rest of the list is based on total sales at Amazon.com since the company went into business.
At Barnes&Noble.com, the process is much simpler: The rankings of more than one million books are based on sales on-line and in the brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble stores over the past six months.
Neither set of rankings is absolutely representative of how the books are doing in the entire publishing marketplace since the two operations, as mammoth as they are, still represent only a small percentage of U.S. book-buying, notes Paul Bogaards, the top publicist at Knopf. Other lists, such as those in the New York Times and USA Today, are considered more accurate. But, at the most, those only cover the top 150 books. For all others, the Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com rankings are the only place authors can look to see how their books are doing.
The two sets of rankings have their quirks. Because the Barnes&Noble.com list is based on six months of sales, the ranking of an individual book tends to remain fairly stable, moving up or down slowly, if at all. By contrast, a book in the top 10,000 of Amazon.com can bounce around a lot, since the rankings represent a day’s worth of sales and that can be significantly impacted by a single spurt of buying.
“As an ego charge, I would recommend in radio and TV interviews that people buy my book on Amazon.com,” says Weller. “One day, I was around 9,000, and I was interviewed on WBEZ in the morning, and the book was up to 700 in the afternoon.”
Amazon.com began listing the sales rank of its books in 1998, and the initial idea for doing so had nothing to do with boosting the egos of writers.
“Every day, our founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to spend 15 minutes just sort of cruising the site and looking for things that could be better,” Curry says. One day, Bezos realized that, instead of providing a traditional bestseller list of 10 titles as they ranked the previous week, it would be possible to give a virtually up-to-the-minute list — and not just for the biggest sellers but for all volumes on sale.
One oddity of the Amazon.com list is that there are times the number-one book isn’t even available. That’s because the rankings are based on orders, and the site accepts orders before a book is published. Thus, even before the latest Harry Potter book went on sale last July, it was ranked first in sales.
Earlier this year, Barnes&Noble.com followed Amazon.com’s lead by offering its own sales rankings. “It was something that our customers, and particularly our customers who are self-published authors, wanted to see,” says Laura Dawson, director of content development for the company.
Publishers watch both lists, particularly to see how well marketing campaigns are doing. “If you get an author on the Today Show, you can check out Amazon.com the day before and the day after,” Bogaards says.
But it’s the authors themselves who most closely track the rankings, and, while it can be a heady experience as the book moves up, Anne Rice worries that paying too much attention could backfire when the book stalls or starts to drop down. “When you see you’re at 25,000th, I hope you don’t despair,” she says.
Kirkpatrick and Webster-Thurlbeck know all about the highs and lows that come with closely following the Cayce book’s rankings.
“Yesterday, when we got up, our book was at 4,276 [on Amazon.com],” says Webster-Thurlbeck, “but, last night, when we went to bed, it was at 705.” Wonderful news, but the couple couldn’t be sure the reason for the improvement. The best they could guess was that it was the result of a mention of “Edgar Cayce” at about.com, a linked network of 700 websites.
The next morning, though, the news was bad, very bad: The book was down to 9,278.
“It made our morning walk less pleasant than usual. And imagine our relief to come back from dropping our children off at school to find it at 737,” Webster-Thurlbeck says.
Kirkpatrick, the author of three previous books, including a true-crime account, “A Cast of Killers,” that reached number 6 on the New York Times bestseller list in 1986, says he’s willing to take the sorrows of the sales rankings with the joys. “It’s positive reinforcement,” he says. “So often, it’s so easy to get discouraged as an author. But now you can give a good interview and see immediate results.”
Besides, Kirkpatrick adds, “For my last two books, I had no idea what was happening until six months later — and the book was off the shelf. Information is power.”
The rankings, he says, are a means of alerting editors and publicists to a book’s potential. “It’s not just the Tom Clancys who can capture a publisher’s attention now,” he says.
