I support locally-owned businesses. I don’t own an e-reader. Amazon won’t let me review friends’ books because I don’t spend money on the site. I didn’t begin actively using them until my book was nearly a year old because I relied on retail and direct sales.
Should I be embarrassed to be doing so well on the Big A?
The Kindle edition of my book ranked #1 in its Amazon category during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It finished the year in that #1 position before sinking more than a few notches back to where it usually lives.
Amazon sales have kept me in coffee money, and not much more. Having said that, finishing first in the Tao Te Ching category feels good. Almost making the Top 100 in Self-Help is almost as satisfying, too.
But I’m surprised at how my modern take on the Tao is “occult”. Relying on the word’s actual meaning and my obviously obsolete usage, I never considered a self-help book based on old Chinese philosophy to be any sort of hidden knowledge. But just as New Age stores have become Metaphysical Shops [and Shoppes], Amazon’s labelling language passed me by. Is this just another sign that I’m growing older? A friend recently pointed out that one of the signs of age is that you no longer know or care who all the famous people are.
I never really considered myself an occultist, but in the Gospel according to Bezos, I guess I am. I like the company I’m in, surrounded by books on meditation and assorted cosmologies. My old view of the classification was primarily paranormal thrillers and other books of similar ilk. Today, occult is a subset of religion and spirituality, adjoining my other classification. I’ve come to think of it as learning another language. You need to put aside your native-born grammar and preconceptions to learn a new way of talking about what you already know.
Another bit of learning, which doesn’t surprise me, is that it looks like most of my audience doesn’t have [or just doesn’t use] Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service for unlimited eBook reading. I signed up for Unlimited and promoted it for a few months. Total page views? Zilch. I guess my readers and I share some of the same Luddite habits.
The takeaway from all this? If I want to sell more books, I may have to start wearing a big “A” on my chest. It might – or might not – wind up on my clothes. But it’ll never, ever, be tattooed on my body or soul.
P.S. If you don’t have your copy of the book already, and want to buy one so that you can support your local bookseller or give it a 5-star Amazon review, here are a couple of links you can use.
https://yourdayyourtao.org/shop/
