The day my rating went over a cliff

I checked one day on my crime book, A Dozen Crime Stories from a well-known, big box, discount, retail chain, and it had gone over a cliff: from about five million to eleven million, overnight. I panicked! What's up with this? It took me a while but I figured it out.

That's one of my older books; early, inspired, relatively short. Once I took it and sold it on consignment at a LUbbock bookstore, and someone stole it; I never got my money. What could one do? Stop selling books on consignment. It complicated my life too much.

But the answer to my question was this: it was an old book, maybe ten years old, and had just gone over that mark. A lot of its sales had happened immediately after I produced it, and I myself bought quite a few of them. So all those sales went over a line where they weren't counted anymore, after ten years. If your book doesn't have enough sales in the last ten years, it has a rating like eleven million.

The thing is, as an author, you live in fear that some demon in the heart of Amazon is just there to punish you, and tack six million onto your rating just because you have the audacity to keep cranking out books like that. Nobody at Amazon has reached out to give me punishing threats or anything like that. I've been lucky. They consider themselves lucky to have me exclusively, too. It's odd, but the chances they've had to punish me or come after me, or suspend my account, they haven't. I'm grateful and try not to break their rules.

A cliff is just a cliff. All you can do is sell a few more books, and, if necessary, to yourself.