After who knows how many years of goofing off, I finally got around to getting my Author Page on Amazon looking pretty. Some photos, a basic blurb, updates fed in from this blog — and a few but by no means all of the books with some connection to me scrolling across the top.
It’s odd what the techno hoops you jump through will allow vs. what they won’t. At the moment, the only link they’ll do for the current edition of the Hammett Tour book is for the Kindle — but there is a main page for that item that offers the options of hardback, paperback or eBook. Obviously that would be the page to send people to, but Noooooo. . . .
And I checked some of the other books to make sure the Author Page was presenting with them — and what did I discover? Only that a page for the second edition of The Literary World of San Francisco — which has been out-of-print for, what, twenty years? — listed the overall sales rank as 2,781,588 (like I said, it has been o.p. for decades) but that it still managed to crack the Top 100 in sales for travel books about San Francisco.
Yeah, yesterday it was logging in at no.97.
I perhaps will never understand the complexities of the Amazon bestseller sub-lists, but I’m guessing enough copies are out there moving around on the used book market to keep it in the game. Somehow.
And more power to those used copies. I’ll be lugging one along tonight for backup as I conduct a literary walk around North Beach, by appointment with the Alfa Romeo Club. I hardly ever do those walks any more, but the public asked for it, so why not?
