Joe made a interesting point in his comment on my last entry: that the baseball book of his that got up to #150 on Amazon.com sold pretty much like his other baseball books in the end. Maybe that means that, especially with a focussed subject matter and generally good reviews, a certain number of people are going to buy your book; the convenience of on-line shopping means that when a particularly good review comes out, instead of making themselves a note to stop by the bookstore in the next week or so, they can all buy it right away. Because the Amazon rankings are relative to all other books' sales during whatever period they're using, it's possible that a hundred people buying a book in the same day can push you up to the very small numbers. The NY Times list is for a weeks' worth of sales; Amazon's can be for a day's worth, and up at the very top it's updated, I think, hourly. But the Amazon rankings aren't published as a "bestseller list." You can look that up on Amazon but it's a pain and it lumps all book types together. So the fact of being #3, say, at Amazon, doesn't have an impact on sales the way the fact of being #3 at the Times does.

I am nevertheless WAY impressed that Joe got to #150. I've never gotten that high.