Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Amphigory + Bestseller

All right, another quick Amphigory.  I'm not sure how intuitive the pun is on this one, so I'll give some clues below:

The question is, why isn't that one on the middle left selling as quickly as the others?  Hum... I wonder... It must be a...

In other fun news, I'm a Best-selling author!  (Assuming, of course, that you want to use random Amazon rankings on rather insignificant stories as a measure.)  Yesterday, for about twelve hours, my short story "Hope of Elantris" was the number one best-selling short story on Amazon.com. 

This is amusing to me because there's been news, recently, on the net of people inflating their Amazon rank numbers for a short time just to call themselves best-selling authors.  The thing is, it's all pretty meaningless.  Amazon is a very small part of the market, and because they update their sales rankings so frequently, it's very easy to get yourself some quick numbers there.  Only people who manage to have a low number on Amazon over a very long period can have any real bragging rights. 

The more amusing thing is, however, the term 'best-selling' is very ambiguous in the first place.  I'm a best-seller at my local bookstores, since people how live nearby tend to go buy my books in larger numbers than people in other areas.  Yet, people go to some pretty big extremes--spending as much as 12 grand on PR firms--just so that they can get number one on Amazon for a few hours, then be able to call themselves 'best-sellers.'

That all said, and knowing that it's pretty meaningless to be number one on Amazon shorts, I did email my editor, take a screen shot, and pat myself on the back a few times.  By this afternoon, however, Kim Stanley Robinson (a Hugo-award winning novelist) had unseated me!  As of this post, I'm down to number six.  What a tragedy!  How quickly we fall!  It looks like my fifteen minutes of Amazon Short fame has come to a quick demise.  Ah, well.

(At least I still have this screenshot!)

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