The Amazon.com factor

This morning I awoke to discover that -- in less than 12 hours -- the Amazon.com ranking of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel had fallen over 6000 points, from 2109th to 8216th. It was as if, overnight, the significance of my book had shrunk to a measly fraction of its former size. This is not the first time something like this has happened in the three weeks since the book has been out, and it can make publishing feel like playing the stock market in some third world country.

Moreover, it makes me wonder what neophyte authors had to obsess over back in the dark ages (say, ten years ago) before Internet merchandizing took the world by storm. After all, on websites like Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, an author can now spend literally hours a week brooding over the status of his book. For all practical purposes it’s a waste of time, but I can’t seem to stop doing it.

Take my Amazon.com listing, for instance. Late last year, sometime around October, I was thrilled to discover that Vagabonding had been listed within the pages of the massive online shopping center. There was no thumb-photo of the cover and no book description information (and Vagabonding was ranked in the mid-millions), but it made me feel that, in a post-Descartesian way, I existed. My book was months away from actual release, but I regularly checked back to the page, just to make sure it was still there.

Unfortunately, a couple weeks after my initial listing, someone surfed onto the Amazon.com Vagabonding page and -- using a special form designed for the purpose -- recommended a rival book instead of Vagabonding. I use "rival" in the most flexible sense of the word here, since the book that was recommended over mine was about stay-at-home parenting, and was penned by some minor icon of the Christian Right. How a book about traditional parenting is meant to replace a book about long-term travel is not something I can readily explain, but that’s the anarchic nature of online merchandising: ostensibly, anyone can go online and say anything they please about anything they want. This means that people -- authors, even -- can go online and try to manipulate certain Amazon listings to draw attention to certain books. And, since my book wasn't even available at the time, this made me feel like the victim of a conspiracy. I imagined a secret bunker underneath Jerry Falwell's headquarters, where scores of stay-at-home motherhood revolutionaries spent their days plotting the failure of my book.

Just as I was getting used to the notion of sharing my Amazon Vagabonding page with a Christian parenting manual, I noticed that -- somehow -- used copies of Vagabonding were showing up for sale in Amazon Z-Shops. This baffled me, since the book still hadn't been released (I suspect that some book reviewers have a habit of getting extra latte money by selling of any advance copies they don't use). I suddenly became convinced that online merchandising would become my worst nightmare. As the book's January 8th release date approached, I pessimistically braced myself for a slew of zero-star ratings and sneering, sarcastic reviews (presumably originating from Jerry Falwell’s underground bunker).

Fortunately, this has not yet happened; the reader reviews of my book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble have all been positive -- and thus I’ve had to scrap my conspiracy theory. No doubt I’ll get some negative reviews in time (you can’t expect everyone to love your book), but for now it's nice to visit the Amazon Vagabonding page without such a sense of dread.

Of course, this post-publication optimism quickly morphed into obsession, especially after my author interview appeared in USA Today, and my Amazon rank jumped nearly 22,000 places within seven hours on January 10th. I'd started the morning at a humble 23,172th, and went offline that afternoon ranked a respectable 1220th. The following day, I was up to 476th at Amazon, and 177th at Barnes and Noble. I was firmly among the top-ten travel books for both sites (though I’ll confess that no less than three of my hottest competitors were guides to Disneyland; such is nuance the travel book ranking system). It was, all things considered, a euphoric feeling to have come so far in so short a time.

A few days later I had fallen back to the mid-7000's, however, and it's been a rankings roller-coaster ever since. Occasionally I'll drop in to see how I'm doing at Amazon U.K. (4716th is my best rank so far) or Amazon Canada (2267th on a good day). If I'm feeling frisky I’ll see how Vagabonding is doing against, say, Anna Karennina, or the Bible, or the autobiography of Dennis Rodman. After all, one need not feel too bad about a 9932nd ranking if King Lear is ranked 15,403rd.

I'm sure there will come a day when I stop checking my Amazon page with such regularity. But until then, please be kind to me in the reader reviews. And if you happen to know of any good books about stay-at-home parenting, I don’t want to know about them.

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