New technology delivers instant answers. Google knows how many people live in International Falls, MN (6376 in 2011). IMBD know who played Nick the Bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life (Sheldon Leonard). There are more recipes for chocolate cake out there than anyone can eat in a lifetime.
Authors have benefited from the advent of the Information Age. Sales figures are available in near real time. To be properly impressed by this, you have to understand the previous system. In that one, a bookstore bought a book and, sometime in the next ninety days, paid for that book and it registered as a true sale. The store could also return the book for credit, even before the ninety days are up, which allowed the wonderful experience of negative sales figures. These figures were tallied and given to the author in a quarterly report along, in a good quarter, with a royalty check. Using these sales reports to describe real time sales was about as effective as using Neolithic cave paintings to determine current weather.
Now Book Scan tells you daily sales, and even charts them. Novel Rank gives you a close sales approximation for Amazon. (How cool to see “Last sale: 0 hours.”) Amazon updates Kindle sales figures and every book’s ranking throughout the day. I’m certain there are even more systems available to publishers, but these are the ones even self-published authors have access to.
Great progress, right? Hell no. Writing is a profession rife with rejection. Agents reject your queries. Magazines reject your flash fiction. Editors reject your novels. If by some miracle of talent and timing, you survive that gauntlet, you still have the chance to be rejected by readers. In the old days you could be bummed out once, then have ninety days to rebuild your sense of self-worth before the enduring another kick to the head. Now you can find out how few people appreciate your hard work every sixty minutes. That doesn’t leave a lot of recharge time. Watching a slow selling book every hour is like playing every game of keno at Harrah’s dawn to dusk without winning.
Sales wax and wane. They also usually miss expectations, mostly because we set expectations high. (Even bestselling authors probably look at sales and say, “What, only 28,000 copies sold this week?”) Chill about the numbers, and confine yourself to one update a week. The summary reveals more than the fluctuating individual days do, anyway.
Spend your time writing. After all, which feels better, reading that your book moved up two in the Amazon ranking, or reading your newly-minted descriptive paragraph that paints a perfect picture? The creative process is what keeps us motivated. The thrill of summoning a story out of thin air lasts longer and runs stronger than the one any sales figures can summon.
