So this spring, Confessions of the Other Mother came out and of course I’ve been watching its progress as it (bearing my humble essay) inches its way up and down the Amazon.com sales rank list.
Imagine my thrill when I saw it debut at a sales rank in the vicinity of 855,592 (out of 4+ million books). “I’m no mathematician,†I said to no one in particular, which usually means my dog or my cat, “but that’s in the top 21.389 percent!†Imagine, next, my crestfallenness when I did a little research and discovered that books with such rankings are flying off the shelves at something like the rate of like a coupla per year. Nationally. One has to crack the top 10,000 to start to represent anything beyond friends & relatives’ purchasing power.
Still, I watch.
What I’ve begun to enjoy is the serendipitous juxtapositions. On the same sales rank page as Confessions–that is, the 25 books within spitting distance, sales-wise, have been, variously:
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Poor Richard’s Almanac
Bird Songs of Minnesota
Success Secrets of a Top Member of the Mary Kay Sales Force
On the classy side, one day we were snuggled up alongside Jaques Lacan’s Ecrits: The First Complete Translation in English.
But today was the bonanza: Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight. That The Pelican Brief shared the same page barely caught my notice.
As of today it has almost climbed into the top 20,000. It’s a great book. Keep on climbing!