Watching the Amazon flow

One of the things authors do, of course, is to watch their Amazon sales rank. When the hardcover of Mousenet first came out at the end of 2011, it checked in at a respectable 33,000 out of the three million or so books that Amazon deals with.

 After the first few weeks, it settled back into six figures, where it chugged along quite cheerfully, with a big boost towards the low end of that range when the paperback came out last February.

 So there we were on a Nile cruise ship where you had to pay through the nose for fifteen minutes of Internet. I used some of that expensive time to check up on the old mouse and could hardly believe it. That day, 14,000. The next, 11,000. Yesterday, under 5,000 and change. Suddenly, the mouse has roared.

 No, it’s not because kid word-of-mouth has suddenly made my book the next big thing–it’s the Florida effect. The Sunshine State Young Reader Award. Every year, third through fifth-graders select their favorite book from a list of fifteen–and Mousenet is on the list. Yay!