Best-seller? No. Author? Yes

Hard to believe, but a year ago this week Lost in the Ivy hit the major online retailers. Not by storm. More like a drizzle, I suppose. 

But it was sure fun dancing naked even in that light rain back then.

You can see for yourself the roller-coaster ride my book has taken on Amazon.com in this nifty little graph courtesy of Title-Z, which gives a snapshot picture of the book's Amazon sales rankings over the course of the last year. Although a liftetime sales ranking of 413,452 doesn't sound all that impressive, or impressive at all, keep in mind that there are well over 3 million books ranked by Amazon. 

I must confess, though, it's been a little depressing watching that Amazon sales ranking for my book grow like a weed over the last six months. What that obviously means is that hardly anyone is buying my book these days. Sure, every now and then there's a little bump in its ranking but then a week later it's back up in the 700,000 range again.

Should I be surprised that sales of the book have bottomed out? No. Most books have about a three- to six-month shelf life before sales start to slow and eventually become stagnant. And the reality is that I gave up on the book about six months ago when I stopped pumping money and time into marketing it.

The question is, do sales matter? Of course they do, if you want to make money and make your publisher happy and have any hope of getting other books published. And of course sales equates with readers and you want people to read what you wrote or you wouldn't have put it out there in the first place.

Perhaps a better question, though, is should sales matter? And I guess my answer to that is, it depends. It depends on what you want. If you want nothing more than to be a best-selling author, then the answer is, without question, yes. But if you just want to be an author, and you remove "best-selling" from the equation, the answer is, in my mind, no. You should be happy just to have accomplished what few have accomplished: writing a book and seeing it published, no matter how you got it published.

I can't deny that there is a certain part of me that would want to trade places with Stephen King of John Grisham. But there's another part of me that is content just to be what I am: an author.