Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Yesterday was an interesting day on the KRAG blog.

Being supremely new to blogging (Week 5), I’ve been watching the “Stats” page with interest. WordPress provides a nice collection of statistics which—depending on what you see—can be either fascinating or depressing. I’ve been watching the blog-stats bounce along: the number of daily views within easy reach of zero, fewer followers than eggs in a carton, most traffic sourced specifically from my “author” page over on Facebook.

Then, yesterday, a spike: I had views from India, Canada, the UK, Israel, and New Zealand; the number of views was more than double the average; and several folks took the time to leave comments. I asked myself: What the hell happened, and why?

And this reminded me of Amazon.com and their maddening “Sales Rank.”

Of course, I had been aware of Amazon’s “Sales Rank” for a long time, but it really meant nothing to me. I never buy a book because it’s a bestseller. I only buy books because they are recommended or because they just sound interesting. Sales Rank? Who cares? Pas moi.

But when my first novel went for sale up on Amazon, I did a complete 180. Suddenly, nothing was more important than that damned Sales Rank. I began tracking it, checking in on it hourly, in fact, entering what I found in a spreadsheet. I found websites devoted to the tracking of the Amazon Sales Rank. I watched my book’s ranking trend upward, break upward into the 6-digits, into 5-digits, back to six, up again, back again. It would change radically, without discernable logic, bouncing from a low rank of over 1 million up to under 60,000. Then, one day, as I repeatedly hit F5 to refresh my screen, it bounced up to around 1,400.

Number 1,400!! Out of millions! Boy-o-boy! I was on my way!!

When I hit refresh again, it was back at #90,000. What the hell happened? And why?

I did more research, found article upon article purporting to divine the math, method, and meaning behind these numbers. Taken in the aggregate, however, it quickly became clear that no one really knows how the Amazon Sales Ranks are calculated.

I stepped back, and thought again about what the Amazon Sales Rank meant to me as a reader. This arcane, inscrutable number meant nothing to me as a reader or purchaser of books, so it probably meant little to the public at large.

Of course, the stats associated with my blog have a little more meaning—each new reader is potentially a new person who might want to read one of my books—but should I spend time tracking the stats and trying to discern the reason they spiked or dipped? Shouldn’t I spend my time on more meaningful and productive efforts? Damned straight.

It comes back to why I do this: for the love of writing, and for the conversations it engenders. It doesn’t matter to me if this blog has 20 readers or 20,000; it’s the writing, the connection, and the interactions with readers and other writers that count most.

k