Rankings: Boom or Bust

c2011Shalako

My computer blew up last Sunday night, which was a little bit traumatic. I went to my sister's house on Tuesday, just to check my e-mails. Going to my Kindle Digital Text Platform dashboard, I started clicking around and was startled to see that I had given away quite a few copies of 'The Handbag's Tale,' an 11,000 word short story featuring Inspector Maintenon and a murdered banker.

'Murder at its most French,' as I am calling it. 'Murder at its most sardonic.'

That price change only took effect Sunday or Monday and they were just flying off of the shelves!

Right now, (Saturday, May 14, 2:30 a.m.,) that book stands at #15 on the Amazon UK Free E-Books Crime>Thrillers>Mystery rankings, and is #45 in the UK Free Store. It stands at #256 in the US Free Kindle Store, and I watched it drop five places in the space of five minutes...interesting feeling.

In less than a week, I have given away over 3,500 e-books on Amazon US and UK.

Just to put all this in perspective, I worked my, er; 'butox' off during e-book week (Mar 5-12,) on Smashwords, and gave away a total of 130 copies of my five titles. Since my computer was out of service this week, I only used a borrowed machine for an hour a day, and put out on Twitter and Facebook no more than half a dozen links at best. They were not all for this title.

Also to put this in perspective, my best selling title is 'Heaven Is Too Far Away,' which now stands at around #55,000 in the Amazon UK store.

What's the big difference between the two books? About a buck, or approximately 0.71 Great Britain Pounds last time I checked. Some of my other titles are down in the three hundred thousand rankings! But down at that level, all you have to do is to sell two books and you rocket up the charts into the low two hundred thousands.

Have a pleasant morning, or evening, or day, or whatever.

(It's not like we don't earn it.)