Amazon rules

This is a one-off observation, nothing to do with my world views, as in the headline to my blog. It's about Amazon and authors. So my book, First with the News, about my frontline and other experiences as a journalist for the Daily Express and then, for the last 30 years, on The Times, has now been out for about three and a half months. I have discovered, presumably like all authors, that the only true weather vane for sales is Amazon's book ranking which changes by the hour. It is easy to become obsessed by it. I AM obsessed by it. I check on the rankings of my book every two hours or so. It's pathetic but that's the way it is. First with the News appears to have sold petty well although I have no idea as yet how many. But having been reasonably high up, in the very low hundreds on the ranking chart, I have now slipped to around 400,000. So I'm never going to be in the top 100, well who knows. But after suffering deep depression at how down the chart my book now is I suddenly acquired an extraordinary fact, well a claimed fact, which lifted my depression almost immediately. Ok, so I'm 400,000 from being Number 1, but Amazon apparently sells at any time nearly 34 million books. That's 34 million. So on that basis, 400,000 is not so bad and the low hundreds is amazing. I think Amazon is extraordinary, they publish so  much detail about your book, publish reviews, which in my case, fortunately, have all been terrific, many written by people I don't know, and then, of course, list the rankings. So it's a daily routine for me to switch on my laptop in the morning and, first thing, go to Amazon. By comparison, other publishing outlets, well at least for my book, often give very few details and certainly no rankings. It took me weeks to persuade Foyles, for example, to include an image of the front cover of my book on their website, along with the barest of details about the book itself. I can't see anyone buying my book from Foyles, one of the most famous names in the bookselling market in Britain. My local Waterstones bookshop in Richmond, another famous name, have been brilliant, displaying copies of the book which sold pretty quickly. See pictures below of the one copy still unsold, now on the shelf of the biography section. I like being not far from a biography of Charles Dickens! But Amazon rules, God bless 'em. I just wish that the book now on the 400,000 ranking mark starts selling big-time to push me further up the ladder. I don't want to hover around the 400,000, let alone slip further down, even though I'm a long way from being the 34th million!