Tryin’ To Make It Real, Compared To What?

My book of collected flash fiction, The Devil’s In The Cows, is currently Number Two…

Wait a second, I didn’t like the way that last sentence was shaping up. It’s currently ranked second on Amazon’s list of “Hot New Releases In Short Stories“

It’s currently ranked 43rd in sales on Amazon for Fiction, Short Stories. I feel like I’m young and single again, as I’m ranked between “Dating my Vibrator” and “Christmas in High Heels” on the popularity scale.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has me by a nose, right now, but I’m seven slots ahead of that fellow that claims to be a writer from Maine named Stephen King. He may very well be from Maine, I guess; but I’ve lived here for over a year now and I’ve never run across the guy…

I realize upon closer inspection that that last sentence was an unfortunate turn of phrase to use regarding Stephen King, and apologize unreservedly. Anyway, if Stephen King really lived in Maine, I expect he would have been in my living room at least once by now. There just aren’t that many of us up here. I bet he shares a villa with Gore Vidal near Como and just keeps a PO box in Skowhegan to keep the revenuers off his scent. 

The Devil’s In The Cows is currently the 3013th best-selling book of any kind on Amazon.

I find upon looking around that there are at least 450,000 volumes about sparkly vampires alone available at Amazon, so if you throw in all the other books for sale there about vivisection and cooking and how to code websites so they don’t work very well and Fabio with his shirt half-off and ex-government officials explaining why they should get a medal instead of an hour in the stocks, 3013 doesn’t seem so bad.

But in the words of Joe Mantegna in The Money Pit, “Let’s not get nuts, here.”  I notice every other book around me on the lists have the full panoply of agents and publishers and flacks working on them day and night. All I have are friends and Windows XP and my own efforts. Friends are better, no matter how quickly I might slip from sight. You have a best seller? Compared to what?

I won’t get nuts, because I know, as I wrote in A Fresh Crop Of Rocks:

A farmer never thinks wrong. That’s because a farmer never thinks his troubles are over. A farmer knows when he’s eating a turkey with one hand and holding hands with a pretty girl with the other, things are going to go downhill soon. He feels about the same way when his hands are empty and the girl is ugly.”

I’m hardly a farmer, but the point stands. Thanks to all my readers that purchased a copy, and to Bird Dog, and to Glenn Reynolds, and Daphne, and Jill, and Julie, and everyone else who I’m overlooking in my haste to go and make a coffee table, and especially to Gerard Van der Leun for helping me sell my little book.

If you haven’t purchased a copy yet, you’re in luck. Amazon and Barnes and Noble are engaged in a discount war over the book, and it’s currently available for only $8.60.

Buy my book!