At first I was going to post this on www.drstowel.com, but I felt it was probably of more interest to the casual blog reader than it was of any significance to my book. With my book just barely available through online distribution channels, I've already reached a sales rank of 1,707,560. This isn't great. The best selling book has a sales rank of 1. But this is a significant event in that it is not the worst sales rank there is. That means that despite a complete lack of real marketing, being written by an unknown author, and barely having been available for order, my book has already sold slightly better than hundreds of others.
Barnes & Nobel is still in a fluctuating state of "No New Copy is Available at This Time" that I have been unable to rectify. The book has not been available for weeks now... and a sales rank did pop up briefly but is now hidden from view once more. The sales rank was 186,000 (ish) on B&N.com, but I have no frame of reference against which to judge this. Is this fantastic, as it would seem when compared to the Amazon rank? Or (more likely), does B&N simply rank their books differently so that the upward reaches of bad-book-sale-figures do not reach the 1.7 million mark? Again, it is significant in that there were worse ranks out there. Only time will tell, I suppose.