Part of what Amazon gives authors, at least those who publish through Kindle Direct Publishing (the self-publishing arm) is a site called Author Central. It’s a place for you to manage your listed books, add or change various descriptions, both for books and author profile. One of the nice features is…

…sales statistics! For a guy who earned his worst college grade in Statistics class, I kind of like them. Of course, I don’t worry about standard deviations and deltas and sigmas—wait, the sigma might have been the standard deviation. I like to see the number, however.

On March 5 I had a sale of my short story “Mom’s Letter”. That brings me up to 13 sales of it in the almost 13 months it’s been available, earning me a whopping $4.96 in royalties. One of those sales was at Smashwords, the others at Kindle. If sales continue at the pace of about one a month, in three years I’ll have earned about $14-15 dollars on the story. Does that justify my efforts? I think so.

One other feature at Author Central is a graph of sales rank. It probably isn’t meaningful when your book isn’t selling (and a short story is the same as a book in terms of statistics). When “Mom’s Letter” was first released, I had two sales on the first day and it soared to rank about 42,000 in the overall Kindle Store rankings. Since then it has slid. At Author Central you can access this graph, and expand it to “all available data”. The problem is this data goes back only about eight months, so I don’t have the data from the earliest days. I didn’t discover Author Central until that earliest data passed into cyber-oblivion.

Here’s the graph as of 8:30 AM this morning, Central Time.

The interesting item to notice on the graph is that, when your rank is way, way down there, a single sale makes a difference. That one sale on March 5 resulted in a jump in the rankings of over 480,000. That tells me that approximately 115,000 titles in the Kindle Store have a sale on any given day. Then each sale of another title will lower your rank. If I ran the same graph right now, the sales rank would be 134,036. That tells me that 20,000 different titles have had a sale since 8:30 this morning.

Actually, since the ranking number is updated hourly, and since I don’t know when on March 5 I had that sale, my rank might have been higher than this. A single sale on Jan 1, 2012 pushed the ranking up to 86,835. Although, I don’t know if that’s really correct, since I don’t know how hourly rankings are turned into daily rankings once the data passes into ancient times.

Sales rank is interesting, but not terribly important. I usually check my sales once a day, but don’t check sales rank unless I’ve had a sale since my previous check. Sure, it would be nice to make a top 100 list (I just checked: it’s not on the top 100 short story list), but I’m not going to obsess over it. Much better to be writing and publishing than obsessing over sales and sales rank.

In “Too Old To Play“, young Danny Tompkins dealt with the after-funeral party at his house. Then years later, as an adult, he remembered and re-thought what was going on. No doubt this was a difficult memory for me, and the short story echoes much of what I felt at the time.

In the church we attended, victory over death wasn’t something that was preached. Death was final, and a person didn’t actually go to heaven or hell upon death, but to that in-between place, waiting on the “bus” to one place or the other, based upon the ticket vouchers being sent along by those left behind. Death was final. There was no assurance of heaven, no good news.

So a funeral was not a celebration of a person’s life, but rather a mourning of the death. First came the wake. It was different back in the 1960s. We spent two nights at the funeral home, with people viewing the casket, then passing by to express condolences. My grandparents, mom’s mom and step-dad, were at one end of the row, then us children, then Dad. Or maybe he was between some of us teens. Two night of a solid stream of “I’m so sorry for you.” Back then people didn’t bring pictures and mementos of the person’s life. We didn’t celebrate a passing; we mourned a death. We had no hope.

Today it’s different. If I was a teenager in 2012 with a mom who died a slow and painful death, when the end came we would celebrate her passing with pictures and doilies she’d crocheted and other things to remind us of her. We would say things about her being free of her suffering, and looking down from us in heaven.

But back in 1965 we had no hope. The wake reinforced that, and the gathering after the funeral gave the adults a couple of hours release, delaying the eventual grieving. Did it help? Was Dad able to recover more quickly because those friends, neighbors, and relatives came to talk, drink, smoke, and laugh with him? I suppose he did.

So “Too Old To Play” tells an honest memory of that day, as much as I remember of it. The adult memories are mostly fictional, but not completely. Again, I wrote it to tell a story, but if some teen, or even an adult, is helped through their grieving by it, then it will be a good thing.

Not too many teenagers these days experience the death of a parent. Medical advances mean life expectancy is greater. Workplace safety rules mean fewer industrial accidents. There is war, and military deaths, but even these are fewer than during the Vietnam years.

So I wonder if much of a market exists for my two short stories. These tell the story, fictionalized, of my own experience with my mother’s death when I was 13. In “Mom’s Letter” I tell about the sharpest memory at all, when Dad told me while we were driving home from scout camp that Mom’s death was imminent. I had no idea. Just like in the short story, he asked me how I could possibly not have known, that it was obvious from looking at her and how much more difficult it was for her to move around. Somehow I had missed it.

The second short story, “Too Old To Play“, recounts the after the funeral gathering at our house. At the time it seemed inappropriate. All I wanted to do was grieve. Yet here were all these people: neighbors, cousins, neighbors of my grandparents, and who knows who, at our house, yucking it up. I didn’t understand the power of diversion to assist with the early part of grieving. So I fumed a bit, hid in my room as best I could, and weathered the storm.

My adult perspective is different, of course. I understand the grieving process much better. Death has come ever closer, and I now know the people who die around me. Years ago they were vaguely familiar names. Now they are friends and relatives. If I don’t understand grieving now, I’m in trouble.

Why did I write these two short stories? I suppose just to tell a story. But in my subconscious, maybe it was with the intent of helping some teenager somewhere through the grieving process, to help them see that someone else went through it at a vulnerable age, and “graduated” to adulthood without too much trouble. If I could do it, they can too.

I have a couple of more memories I could share in short stories, and possibly I will. Having completed and published two, I only want to write more if I can do it in a way to help someone with their grief. A teenager perhaps, or an adult who experienced what I did, and still needs help with it. I’m thinking about it.