We all know about best seller lists. Best seller lists make a different. A lot of people buy based on what is on the top of the list. This is not just laziness, best seller lists are a way to find out what is good. There is a relationship between what is good and what is selling. It is not a 1 to 1 correlation, but there is a correlation.
Last week Amazon started something new, Amazon Author Rank. It is a best seller list for the authors, not the books. NPR had an article about this yesterday. And I have to agree. When it is the books being ranked it seems more objective. When the Authors are being ranked it seems more personal, a popularity contest..
Amazon has not released how the Author Rank works (or how its best seller rankings work), so we really don’t know how objective it is. I wish it was not updated hourly. I really don’t want my favorite authors to be obsessively checking their ranking and not writing. I want them to be writing. But it is an interested thing to look at, at least occasionally.
