I had this post ready to go yesterday, my scheduled day for this blog, but forgot about it. Here it is a day late.

Author Central is an Amazon website that provides information to authors. Actually, it may also provide info to readers about authors. Despite being registered there for three years I haven’t explored it much. The main reasons I go there is to check book sales and author rank. In fact, normally I just check author rank. If my rank hasn’t budged from the previous day, or if it just continues to drop, I know I have no sales.

The figure above was my author rank at about 7:30 a.m. on November 11, 2014. That means I was the 502,648th most popular author on Amazon, considering both print books and e-books. So 502,647 authors who have their books listed on Amazon were, as of that moment, more successful at selling books than I was. I’ve spent my life as a second-stringer, but this is ridiculous.

The reason I bring this up is because I have sunk to new depths. Here’s a graph of my ranking since Amazon instituted this service.

As you can see from that, my rank has occasionally topped 100,000, but not often. And, my rank as of Nov 11th had hit a new low. It was the first time I was below 500,000. The rank listed for each day, except for the current day, is where you were at the end of the day, probably Pacific Time. You can see the effect a single book sale will have on an author ranking as low as mine.

I’m not doing any promotion right now, since life gives me no time to write I’m not going to carve out time to promote. Not to mention that I hate promotion of myself. Also, the print books I buy from them to sell personally don’t count. I have another 40 or so of those that would have helped my ranking.

So, we’ll see what the future brings. For right now I drag along the bottom. I know there are others lower ranked than I am, but I can only account for me.