Enough about me

Caught in the metrics

A kind of madness can set in when you’re trying to promote something. Look at me! Terrible. Let’s see what the critics/audiences are saying! Dreadful.

I am also grateful for the opportunity, which is part of the madness bit. The delusions of grandeur stemming from ‘you can now go to the bookstore and buy what I think about Hyacinth Bucket.’ That’s not normal, not for me, not for anyone. I am aware of this, and finding it surreal in a not-unpleasant way.

But with the highs are lows. Someone found a typo! As did I, a handful of times, while reading the audiobook; audiobook and e-book would have addressed whatever these were but print had already happened, sorry!

Someone (for a fleeting moment that felt like an eternity, the book’s sole Goodreads reviewer) thinks it has too much about Britcoms. Maybe it does! Someone thinks I was rambly on a podcast explaining what the book is about. Maybe I was! I am (if I may) decent at writing and podcasting but elevator-pitching is a different skill and one I’m re-learning as I go.

Then there is this sea of metrics (Amazons Canada and US, Toronto Public Library, Goodreads, am I forgetting something?) whose meanings I cannot discern and I’m checking them compulsively despite not even knowing what the aim is here. Is it to see if the book is selling? I suppose so but to what end? To have future books published? To feel less silly, less vain, when I explain to my husband that I will be unavailable for a school pickup because I’m doing an interview pertaining to my book partly about the himbo episode of The Bob Newhart Show?

I love that the still is of frumpy-but-horny secretary Carol, and had forgotten that the actor who played Jerry the Dentist has the real-life last name of Bonerz.

Are the metrics just some kind of aimless grown-up version of a sticker chart? Habit-wise, they’ve simply popped themselves into the slot vacated by Poshmark. Having determined that the thing to cut was not all clothes-shopping (unrealistic and too depressing, in the end) but rather that specific form of it, I was primed to find some other websites to click on mindlessly.

But I’m never sure what the significance is, of any of the book metrics I compulsively refer to. There are all these made-up Amazon categories, subdivided into ever-smaller ponds, such that every book could well be a ‘bestseller’ in its micro-realm. As great of an honor as it is to have written the number “#1 New Release in Literary Criticism & Theory” on Amazon, US at that so at least one bigger pond, I’m no fool, I see the overall sales figures and know that I haven’t written Famesick, something I was well aware of simply upon waking up in the morning and remembering I’m not in Taylor Swift’s inner circle.

Metrics are also soothing because the alternative is trying to gauge the attitudes of anyone who stands to profit (monetarily or not even) from your writing career taking off or not tanking or whatever. It is possible to hyperfocus on every bit of attention that your book is and is not getting in this area, as though it contains some sort of grand answer to whether your book and therefore you are a holistic winner or loser. I mean it probably does. But it’s a mistake because, at least in my case, it feels more like a zig-zagging graph with bits of both, and rarely in the ways I expect. I will not spell out what I mean by this, a woman must maintain some mystery.

But that’s also a thing, and a reason for honing in instead on such factoids as, the Toronto Public Library has 3 e-book copies but 14 are on hold; 21 hardcover copies, 6 available, 2 on hold, the remaining ones checked out or on hold shelves or some such. Does this mean people are reading or that people are not reading? The “6 available” makes me think, wow, so if this were literally free in front of you you wouldn’t pick it up, but then the 14 e-books on hold, with the wait period that implies (I should know, as a frequent hold-placer myself), if that’s the case then I can’t possibly be Lionel Hardcastle. No one was placing a hold on My Life in Kenya.