Ratings, Bestseller lists - and not believing everything you see.

I love Amazon. Well, I love any bookshop and given the choice I’d rather have a real bookshop rather that a virtual cyber- bookshop. If I’m actually buying a book I prefer to look at it, pick it up, open it, read a bit, check the blurb . . . And I love to browse, to wander along rows of shelves, picking up books that catch my eye and investigating them. Just lately, I’ve also been trying to put them back down again too. I have too many books to read. I don’t have TBR piles. I have TBR shelves – TBR bookcases. So I’m trying to read those and keep a list of what I want to buy when I have time to read any more. (Come back this time next year for a report!)

But as a writer, a real bookshop doesn’t give me what Amazon does – those fascinating little sales figures that say ‘the sales ranking of this book is xxxx’ now on Amazon.com they’ve added a previous ranking for comparison so you can find out where in the ranking the book was yesterday and see by how many thousands it has leapt up – or slid down – overnight.

Of course the problem is with these rankings – and any others on the internet – that on the right day, on a very quiet day, one sale of one book can make a huge amount of difference. It can make the ratings leap by 100,000 or more – which is a great morale boost to an author, but hardly a great boost to royalties! But at least it does tell an author that a copy of the book has been sold. So, for example, my current book, The Married Mistress was at about 147,500 last night – this morning it’s 42,755 (though that may have changed again by the time you read this) – so thank you to the person who bought a copy. It’s also at 18 on the Amazon best seller list for Harlequin Presents – not bad at all for a Promotional Presents (these books have already been released in the limited reader service only so I don’t expect it to sell as strongly as a brand-new, main run of Presents titles.

Shops don’t show you how many copies of the books are selling –though I’m sure it’s a rare author who doesn’t note when her books are on the shelves and how many were there last time. In this, M&B books have an advantage in that they are all shelved together and you can take a quick look to see how your title is selling compared to all the others. But the M&B books never appear on the ‘This week’s bestsellers’ shelves in WH Smith or any other bookshop (if that shop actually stocks them which is rare) And after reading a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times, I’m not surprised.

I’d always known that those ‘Saga of the Month’ or ‘Can we recommend . . .’book of the week slots didn’t come free but the report this week made me blink quite hard. Apparently Britain’s biggest booksellers are demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of “recommended” reads in the run-up to Christmas this year. This means that deals are being operated by retailers to promote lists that consumers believe are based on independent assessments of a book’s quality. No authors appear on recommended lists unless their publishers pay the fees, and those refusing to pay may not even find their titles stocked.

Hmm – well no publisher is going to put that amount of money into an unknown or to promoting a book just because they think it’s great. Publishing is a business and a publisher will need to know that a book has the chance of earning them that £50,000 back – and then some – before they’ll invest in buying it a ‘book of the week’ position at that cost.

There are disadvantages to being published by M&B – the short length of time each book stays on the shelf being one of them – but at least in WH Smith in the UK, the reader and buyer knows just where to find them – all in one section, all shelved together, not disappearing into the huge expanse of shelving along with every other book. They are also all displayed uniformly (too uniformly some would say). So there’s a ‘level playing field’ and if a book has sold out it’s because the readers have snatched it off the shelves because they want to read the latest novel by that particular author and not because the publisher has paid the bookshop some outrageous fee to tell the book-buying public that this is the greatest novel since The Da Vinci Code or the new Harry Potter.

When my editor tells me – as she did about The Antonakos Marriage – that a book I’ve written sold at #1 in that month, then the sales figures that tell her that have not been massaged by an extra payment to the shop to promote my book – it goes up against all the other titles on a level basis and that suits me fine.

There’s one other set of results that I check out and again these are sales figures – in America this time. Every week, Waldenbooks put out a list of the Top Ten Romance Bestsellers in paperback and another listing of the series title books (Harlequin/Silhouette). The Married Mistress has been on that list for the past two weeks – at #6 the first week, moving up to #5 last week. Again, these are sales that come from the real people – the people who matter – the readers. Readers who are influenced by their love of a good story and who want to put their money into something they will enjoy, not something that a bookshop has been paid to tell them they will enjoy.

That’s do for me. I’m delighted to be on the Waldenbooks list- and send a heartfelt Thank you to the readers who put me there.