I’ll let you in on a secret:  we new authors have the obsession  practice of checking our book’s ratings on online booksellers.  Please realize that we are not stupid–our analytical brains may be sketchy but we do in fact realize this is a meaningless endeavor.  Book rank algorithms (which I understand as some weird math magic) are shrouded in mystery.  Plus they vary from one online seller to another.  And they change randomly just when people seem on the cusp of figuring out how things work.

But since there is a huge backlog on actual sales data, it’s almost impossible to keep from looking at these crazy-making numbers anyway. 

So today I was doing some  browsing  on a few international sites for Amazon.com .   Because you never know–a button craze could hit and The Button Collector could become an overnight best seller in Canada.   This is not completely unrealistic since it has had reasonable showings on Amazon UK from the very beginning.  Still, that was about it for sites outside the United States.

Until now. I’m happy to say that today at least,  The Button Collector has a decent ranking on Amazon France.  By decent, I mean it’s a lower number than some other books from big house publishers that came out in a similar time frame.  And it’s in the ball park of books by authors with much more recognizable names.

Ha!  Take that Dan Brown Charles Frazier.  

And what does this mean?

Probably nothing, but it makes me happy to know that a few people in France have ordered my book.

So to them I say, merci, merci!!!