Amazon.com Bestseller?!
It is weird, but only 24 hours ago, I sat here wondering what the results of over a month of work (from many people) would be. I knew that I had never worked on a project where I worked so hard and so long with so much uncertainty of whether the goal had been achieved so close to the end. However, I knew one thing was certain. All of the orders had been made and there was nothing I could do, but enter them into Amazon and wait.
As I sat here, I remember thinking:
- "What if it were to fail?" Would it make us lose credibility to the thousands of people that knew we had been working so hard towards the goal? What would the people who had been asking, "So how is the bestseller campaign going?" every time I saw them, think?
- Similarly, I wondered, "What if it were to succeed?" How would our lives change? How would life of the company change?
The process of entering orders took many hours and did not increase the certainty as it went along. As I entered the 180
th book order, I started to worry a little bit more. Our sales rank was at 509. Knowing the 80/20 rule, which seems to apply to almost everything, I knew that 80% of the sales probably came from 20% of the top bestsellers. Consequently, I knew that for each book ordered
The Student Success Manifesto would move up less than it had the hours beforehand.
When I had this realization, I looked over at Sheena who was also diligently entering in the orders, and said, "Well hun, I don't think we're going to make it." I tried to make it sound like, "Oh well, we can get them next time," but I was still disappointed.
Amazon's sales rank system doesn't update automatically after each order is entered, but instead does so ever hour. Therefore, after we entered in all the orders, we just had to wait and refresh the browser button intermittently, hoping for a big jump.
That jump came in the early afternoon today and the book officially became a bestseller! In retrospect, I learned quite a large amount from the process that I will share in a near future entry.
Now that the campaign is over, it is back to blogging and for that matter life as "normal". Hope you had a good weekend.
Posted at November 23, 2003 08:05 PM
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