Today is our family Christmas celebration. There will be 23 of us here at my home this afternoon. And thirteen of them call me “Nana.” Eight of them are grandchildren and great grandchildren from age 1 to 31. Another five of our guests, who also call me Nana, are the spouses and girl/boy friends of my grandchildren. Also here will be my 91-year-old mother, all three of my daughters and their spouses and my ex-husband. It will be a crowd and boy, will the resident cats be upset. They much prefer the quiet, predictable life.
I’ve been checking ratings for my three latest books this week. Do you do that? Do you check to see if they’re going up or down significantly or only slightly or not at all? Here’s what I’ve discovered about my books this week—Promote Your Book continues to rank higher and higher. Publish Your Book has a sort of slightly up, down, up pattern. And Talk Up Your Book, while in a fairly good rating range, is slowly going down. But remember, that’s just this week.
So what does this mean? Maybe not a darn thing. Maybe it is significant. I don’t know about you, but I hear from some experts that Amazon’s ranking system is meaningful and from others that it is not. But it does give authors a measure to help them/us, perhaps, determine when our marketing is falling flat and when it is working well. Perhaps it serves to give us some incentive to do more promotion or to change the type of marketing we’re doing. Just being aware that we can’t sit still and do nothing and expect to sell truckloads of books.
I’m off to do Christmas. I wish you a Merry one and a New Year of HIGH Amazon rankings.