Below the Beltway

Have you ever purchased books online through Amazon.com? Have you noticed that every single book includes a small "sales rank" number, which changes every hour, measuring that book's success against all 2 million other books out there?

Of course you haven't. That is because you are a normal, sane individual, unlike the tens of thousands of hollow-eyed authors who click onto Amazon.com hourly to see how their book is doing. Washington is full of these people. They're pathetic: infantile neurotics with eggshell egos desperately seeking validation, as though anyone cares if their book happens to leap from No. 7,998 all the way up to No. 2,503, as mine did at 4:12 p.m. on October 23, 1998. It was raining.

Yes, three years ago I wrote a humor book. It's still out there. My book will probably never become a bestseller, in the sense that my dog will probably never become U.S. ambassador to France. I am not sure exactly how many copies of my book have sold because I no longer bother to read the "royalty statements" that my publisher sends me every few months. This is because my royalty statements basically keep making the same numerical point, namely that:

(1) I have no royalties

because,

(2) my book sucks.

At the hour I write this, my book stands at Amazon No. 60,505, which is just a few points better than A Practical Guide to Steam Turbine Technology. But still I keep checking every once in a while because, like all authors, I put great stock in these "sales rank" numbers. Here is how our thinking goes: There are 2 million books out there, and 1,939,495 of them have a higher, and therefore worse, number than mine! So maybe I'm not doing so badly! Maybe I'm selling books left and right!

But we authors can never know for sure, because the people who run Amazon.com are notoriously tight-lipped about the meaning of their rankings. They disclose only very basic facts, such as that their numbers in some manner reflect total sales in the previous 24 hours. Amazon.com refuses to say how many actual sales might be indicated by a ranking of, say, 10,000.

I have always suspected that this is because Amazon knows that, to put it bluntly, there is not a whole lotta sellin' going on. (Any statistician knows that rankings can be deceptive. For example, at the time of the Gulf War, Iraq was said to have the fourth-largest standing army in the world. Maybe so, but there was a helluva drop-off from No. 3.)

I've long wanted to put this theory to a test. Last month, I got the perfect opportunity. For some reason, my book publisher decided to slap a brand-new cover on my book and reissue it in paperback. Why? Beats me. Apparently, book publishers aren't too swift. ("I know! Maybe it didn't sell because it weighed too much!")

When a book is reissued in paperback, Amazon treats it as though it were a completely different book. I checked: My paperback was No. 1,484,129. The only book I could find with a higher number was Nausea and Vomiting: Recent Research and Clinical Advances, with a price tag of $123. (Mine was also weakest-selling book by anyone with my last name. A book by someone named Henry Weingarten was ranked 408,722. It tells you how to use astrology to invest in the stock market.)

So this is what I did: I got 10 friends of mine to each purchase two copies of my paperback online, and they all did it between 2 and 3 o'clock in the afternoon on May 22. Then I sat back to watch the results.

Within three hours, after the purchase of a mere 20 books, mine was at . . .

Are you ready?

. . . No. 1,297. I had improved by one million, four hundred eighty-two thousand, eight hundred thirty-two places.

I made five more purchases, and then was up to 1,025, and in heady company. My book was doing just a little better than Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon. (Though nowhere near the No. 1 hot seller: The Big O -- Orgasms: How to Have Them, Give Them, and Keep Them Coming.)

It was time to call Amazon.com's Seattle headquarters. Unfortunately, after ascertaining that I wanted to talk about their book rankings, no one at the Amazon press office would return my calls. That is a shame, because I was trying to help them. I wanted to suggest that if they are going to give out all these essentially meaningless numbers, they might as well relabel them to better reflect their significance, such as number "eleventeen" or "twelvetty-nine."

But I am not bitter. I still had the euphoria of my near-best-selling ranking. Alas, it didn't last long. At 4 p.m. the next day, precisely 25 hours after my little experiment, my paperback tanked all the way down to No. 59,915. It was selling just a little less friskily than The Healthy Prostate.

Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten@washpost.com