Blessed be the weekend, for it is long and full of writing! ∞
Asides
Yesterday afternoon I heard about the death of Robin Williams. Possible suicide.
I’d heard he was battling depression again, and I’m sorry to hear it took him away from us. Like many brilliant and creative people, his humor had the depth and edge of a person who learned early to hide pain with a grin.
I’ll miss him. ∞
If it is in your power, do something nice for a fellow human being.
Something *they’d* think is nice, not an imposition you force on them out of your own moral or social code. This might require actually paying attention or even – gasp! – asking them how you can really help.
Do that thing.
Then don’t talk about it.
You’ll know. They might know. The rest of the world probably doesn’t need to.
Circa 2016: Sales Rank Express is not longer active because of changes to Amazon’s core programming.
Sales ranks can now be found only for individual novels or by publisher, but they are still a fairly good barometer for estimating sales and rates of sales.
Before querying or submitting work to an unknown publisher, consider checking out how well they’re selling on Amazon. Amazon isn’t the only online vendor, but they are one of the biggest. If a book isn’t selling there, it better be selling like crazy on the publisher’s or author’s website. *
Here’s an easy way to get ballpark figures of current Amazon sales ranks: go here to www.salesrankexpress.com and enter the publisher’s name into the ‘Publisher’ field. Hit search. You’ll see sales ranks for that publisher’s books listed on Amazon. They’re not exact, and are known to be inaccurate for strongly selling books. But those figures seem to be scarily accurate for low-selling books, especially those with estimated single-digit or double-digit Amazon sales per year.
Hint: sales ranks on Amazon are shown in ascending order, ranking all books currently in Amazon’s catalog. The best seller will be #1, the worst way down in the tens of millions.
Why should you check? A publisher with a lot of books ranked over 500,000 simply isn’t selling that well on Amazon, so they might not be good at selling your work there, too.
* There are ways to see how popular a publisher’s site is on the internet, too, if they claim to be selling more from their own site. I’ll cover that in a later aside, or you can go here to learn more. ∞
Haiku for fallen idols:
Gold crown in sunlight,
A distant beacon; come near
To see tarnished brass.
A hint, O Wise and Beloved Readers: while I love comments, I’m hoping to see cogent ones. Patchwork comments with no clear relevance will not be posted, no matter how entertainingly insulting. Likewise, if your email addy leads me to believe you’re pitching knockoff fashion items.
If you cannot pass a college-level Turing test, your post will not be seen on this site.
Added note: If you’re just doing SEO tricks to drive traffic to your commercial site, you will send vague messages with content lifted from online sources. When you use content lifted from online sources, and your email sig comes from ANY kind of obviously commercial site, my spambots will probably squash your message without me ever seeing them. Don’t let your real messages be squashed. Be coherent, be literate, be appropriate to the topics at hand. Convince me and my bots you’re a human. ∞