I Am Not Checking My Amazon Sales Rank Right Now
The only concession I’ve made to being a neurotic writer is to check fairly regularly* my Amazon sales rank and reviews for “A Good Talk.” Oh, OK–I’ve also Googled the efforts at explaining Amazon sales ranks. But that’s it. I swear. Haven’t bugged my publisher, haven’t looked for where (and if) the book is displayed, haven’t harrassed the publicity guy, haven’t beleaguered friends and family with my highs and lows. As a publisher, I saw far too much of this behavior in others, and the person it ends up having the most deleterious effect on is the writer himself or herself.
The rank has been as high as 45 and as low as 12,000 or 13,000. When I last checked–and I won’t tell you how recently that was, lest you get the wrong (that is, right) idea–it was about 6,000. After a while you get used to this sort of metaphorical freestyle skiing course and can be at peace with it. And that rank isn’t bad at all. But the reviews! The negative ones hurt in a way I didn’t expect they would, mainly because like most painful criticism, they hit a nerve. And because as far as I know, the negative reviewers are untainted by influence, personal opinions of me, or the need to curry favor. So they just say it: “Disappointing.” “Elitist.” “Thinly disguised liberal agenda.” “Boring.” “Supercilious.” And so on. I bet the system won’t allow you to do no-star reviews, because if it did, I would surely have some.
The book itself counsels people to take seriously remarks in conversation that seem like insults or criticism, because often they contain a grain of truth that it might be helpful to think about. One Amazon reviewer said he put down the book because it has the word “aesthetical” on the first page. I have to admit that he has a point. There is some truth in the general consensus among poor reviews that my “voice,” insofar as I have one, is Eastern/literary/liberal and sometimes ironical. Some people like that kind of diction–I’ve gotten many good Amazon reviews as well–some don’t. But if and when I write something again, something book-length, I mean, I will in fact try to use plainer speech if I possibly can and if it comes naturally. I do tend toward sesquipedalianism, and a certain arching of the eyebrow (the origin of the word”supercilious”).
Now I must run back to Amazon, in the hope I’m higher than 5,000. That is said to be a watershed number. I remember when I used to think that word was pronounced “water’s-head.” Hadn’t yet learned irony.
*less than the frequency of the #7 subway line in New York City
