I've known authors who can't concentrate for more than 15 minutes without pulling their head out of their fictional world to click through to their fix, even when they have scary contractual deadlines to meet. I've known some who spent days writing macros so the hit could happen automatically. I've known some whose struggle to withdraw had them staring at the screen, sweating with the effort of Not Going There. Even case-hardened Harry Bingham, novelist, non-fictioneer and director of Writers Workshop, who knows more about the book trade than most of us ever will, has confessed to being ever so slightly addicted since his latest book, Getting Published, was launched. And, worst of all, there's a funny little website which Jessica Ruston describes as "crack for writers", because the hit is so intense, and so easily bought, that it's lethal.
I'm talking about Amazon rankings, and yes, I've been addicted to. I haven't had a new book out for a while, and so my novels are chuntering happily along in what look like the lower ranks till you realise there are books on Amazon whose ranking is in the millions. But I still take a peek every few days. And yet Amazon rankings don't tell you how many books you've sold. For one thing, all the online sellers together are only 13% of the market by volume. And because online is very ill-suited to discovering new unknowns, to quote Harry, "if you're a first-time novelist, you can probably chalk up the online market as another place where you're not going to sell in any volume". So how much can even the biggest of them tell you about how your book's doing overall? Although a spike in the ranking is evidence that your book has been bought or searched for, as a way of judging sales it's little more than useless. Amazon, understandably, keep the algorithms they use very, very secret, and although I'm told it's possible to subscribe to Neilsen BookScan to get sales figures for your ISBNs, I've yet to find out how, or how much: this is serious business data at serious business prices, and even then it doesn't reflect every book sold through every till. For actual figures, most of us rely on our publisher's royalty statements, which are a) notoriously baffling b) six months late c) include books which will be returned.
So even though we know it tells you almost nothing, our fingers wizz up to start typing in the address bar a-m-a-z... and we're there. New book. Scroll down. Ahhhhh. Older book. Scroll down. Oh. (Or sometimes the other way round, which in a funny way is nicer.) Back to work. Sticky bit. Pause for thought. Address bar. a-m-a-z... It is about money, of course, or at least how near you are to your advance earning out. It's about your career, of course, and - if you're someone who thinks that way - about how well you're doing against your competitors. But actually the rankings are a pretty hopeless way of measuring even the latter, because what you're really hoping to outdo, as an author, is your publisher's expectations of what your book will sell.
So why do we do it? For the first week, of course you can forgive yourself. But after that? After six months? Three years? The problem is, I think, that writers have no immediate audience. We can't see the faces of our readers, we don't hear applause or the silence that's even better, we can't watch people looking at our pictures, and we're incredibly lucky or J K Rowling if we happen to see someone buying our book. No wonder the figures on my PLR statement for Large Print loans always make me want to cry: suddenly a number has become a real, if vague, person. Other than that, though, we sing into the wind, and only know we're heard if we happen to spot the smoke signals. Is it any wonder that we keep looking up from our manuscript to peer at the horizon?
