Why My Obsession With Rankings?

As most of you know, I am obsessed with Amazon Rankings for The Claire Saga and each of its five books.

I check Amazon every morning when I wake up in the early hours and then a couple of times each day. They change pretty much hourly. Here today, gone in 5 minutes.

This mornings list had all five books of TCS back in the top 100 Amazon Bestsellers in Humorous Science Fiction. So, I’m shouting it from the roof tops.

This result has been a more constant occurrence (all 5) over the past couple of weeks.

Why do I check these lists?

Well, given that the only other way to stay on top of how one’s books are doing is checking the semi-annual royalty statements (which can be a sad moment or two), one needs more timely, current feedback in order to gauge how marketing efforts are working.

As you can see, I’m out here shamelessly dancing as fast as I can, each day, trying to get the word out. And any writer who feels that this is below them, doesn’t deserve your patronage.

I mean, really, who the fuck am I to expect anyone to select one of my books among the millions that are out there. I have to beg my family members to read my books. Most are still pissed I keep killing them off.

You see, every day out there the competition is stiff. There are a lot of books published every year in the US and around the world.

So, my little books are out swimming in a very large pool with a lot of other fishes from all over the world. Very easy to get lost in a crowd.

When I was first deciding on whether to publish my ebooks exclusively through Amazon (a question my publisher, BRW, put to me at the beginning of our relationship in 2020) I found comparable information to the information the Google AI just provided me:

Amazon is one of the biggest book publishers in the world, on par with the Big Five ¹. Amazon publishes over 1,000 books each year through its imprints ¹². Additionally, Amazon is the largest ebook publisher of self-published ebooks, releasing over 1.4 million self-published books through its Kindle Direct Publishing every year ¹

So, I figured that since I was being published by a small publisher in Texas, Black Rose Writing, I better allow them to partner up with a behemoth, that – on an ebook level – would rival the reach of the Big 5 Publishers:

I also know that people – like me – prefer to shop on Amazon for just about everything. So this was my way of getting my books into the largest bookstore of the super-cyber-eMall of the universe.

Now I haven’t selected what sub genre categories my books fall into. Reagan Rothe does that.

When I sat down to write The Wise Ass in 2019, I was shooting for a straight-up, dramatic, mafia lawyer story. Something Grishamish. I had the background to get me there.

Then I met Claire. Yes, she’s real.

But, as I tell anyone who gives a shit, I pretty much black out when I write. Anything that appears on the page is channeled. The elves type it all up for me while I’m asleep at the keyboard and, like Rumpelstiltskin, turn my rough thoughts flax into gold.

I couldn’t tell you where the science fiction came from, except that my magnetic little subconscious must have gathered up the bits and pieces over time.

Or I’m one of those regular alien abductees who has suppressed a whole lot of stuff. Can’t rule it out. My wife Lisa will tell you I have a memory like a sieve. And she’s always asking me where the hell have I been?

The fantasy and dark humor comes from thousands of years of Celtic bloodlines coursing through my soul. What can I say, I believe in magik and the fae. When it comes to dark humor, the Irish will joke at wakes of their own family members, the closer the better, and you never want stand next to the first Irish cop to roll up on a dead body, they will not be able to help themselves.

So, when the first 4 books dropped, they owned the top 10 of the Dark Humor genre for 3 years. I’m not lying, I loved seeing them there. Like the bright, overachieving, first-child in any family, TWA held the perennial #1 spot. The others floated around the top ten.

But then Reagan Rothe, my brilliant publisher, decided during the late summer of 2023 that he should shift the books out of their comfort zone and out before new larger pools of readers. It was like leaving a small high school in bumfuck and moving to the largest university in a metropolis near you. Scary shit.

Needless to say, the books all disappeared from the lists for a few weeks while they found their footing. I almost started drinking again. Withdrawal is real, people.

Oddly enough, it turns out Sci-Fi readers have a wicked sense of humor, and those that are looking for humorous sci-fi books, are willing to overlook the non-sci-fi elements of The Claire Saga. So after a few weeks, the books started appearing in SciFi related genre listings. Whew. Cancel the therapy.

Many reviews begin with something along the lines of “Not normally my favorite genre but . . . .”

But the wonderful constant in all the reviews is their positive response to Claire.

Every reader loves Claire. Full stop.

Claire’s character crosses all genres. Thank you Claire. You were right when you told me to put those silly stories I kept sharing with you, while I fed you, brushed you, and shoveled your shit each day on Casa Claire, down on paper.

So, getting back to my obsession with the numbers game.

The Claire Saga, as a whole, has turned into this gravitational black hole that keeps pulling its new members into the top 100 category. Claire and The Wise Ass pulled An Alien Appeal into the cluster, then they pulled in Kissing My Ass Goodbye, then that expanding collective core pulled in Finding Jimmy Moran.

Now, this observation is 20/20 hindsight, and without any scientific support. Each time I held my breath when a new book dropped. The Great Imposter in me kept waiting for the world to discover I cannot write for shit.

So, when Where The Ley Lines Meet went live for pre-sale, I again held my breath while I waited to see if this was the child that betrayed me.

Less than 3 months out and it’s now appearing regularly with its literary siblings in the top 100 of Humorous Science Fiction category on Amazon.

Those sci-fi readers know their shit. And they like to read. Thank you.

Fuck the New York Times Bestseller list. I’ll happily hang here with my sci-fi buddies with their sensitized funny-bones and we can all have a great laugh at the literary powers that be when some really bright Hollywood producer realizes that Claire and The Claire Saga can take world-wide film aficionados across the country, across the globe, across the universe and across the dimensions, and make them laugh and cry, fight and love, often in the same scene. And can you imagine the run on Claire the Mule figures, in all of her evolving manifestations, that will be appearing for decades under every Christmas tree. The collectors will go crazy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’m obsessed with the Amazon rankings of The Claire Saga. I know what I’m up against out there. Oprah is just not going to give me a platform.

Despite the odds, I owe it to Claire to make her books as successful as I can.

So, my fine, five readers, give this old writer a helping hand. Tell all your friends to go read the first four books of The Claire Saga, and to pre-order WTLLM. so that when I open up my computer on April 16th, I can see WTLLM as the #1 New Release on Amazon.

And, of course, if you know anyone in Hollywood . . . .

But here we are, Monday again before us.

I’m going to finish my cuppa and then cuddle a couple of kitties and do my rounds.

I suggest you fine, five readers do the same. Get Monday behind us. We need to keep this country moving forward.

And no matter what else we have on our plates, let us make today a great one.