More than once I have allowed myself to become as addicted to watching the bestseller charts as I am to gin, caffeine and emails; desperate all the time for a new fix, even though I know it will inevitably lead to another painful comedown.
I can completely understand why ego-crazed pop stars are driven tantrum mad when some giant-selling track from a rival act squats at the top of the charts for months on end, forever depriving them of the ultimate glory they believe to be their right. To be number two or three is great, of course, but to be able to label your book merely ‘a Sunday Times bestseller’ is never going to be the same as being ‘a number one bestseller’.
So many times I have ghosted a potential chart topper, only to be held off the top spot by some other mega-selling celebrity author or freak hit from household names like Jeremy Clarkson and Jamie Oliver, Bill Bryson and Sharon Osbourne, Katie Price and Alex Ferguson, Barack Obama and One Direction (not to mention the Bible, the Highway Code and Who Moved My Cheese?).
I know my addiction is illogical, that a book which sells a thousand copies a week for 20 years and never features in any charts is an infinitely better earner than one that surges out of the starting gate with a 10,000 sale in the first week and has completely petered out by the end of the year. I know it because I have had those too, but I am still addicted to the adrenaline rush of the quick number one surge. The pleasures and rewards of sensible moderation are subtler and require a degree of patience that I always have difficulty in mastering whenever the painful yearning for personal validation takes hold.
More dangerous even than the charts in newspapers like the Sunday Times, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller, are the Amazon rankings. This is a virtual casino that feeds both my paranoia and my normally suppressed ego as a writer in a dizzying, aerobatic display of highs and lows. Where the printed charts only provide weekly fixes I can now get fresh highs and lows every few hours by logging onto Amazon and looking up any one of the titles that I have a vested interest in.
As with all drugs, you take your first hit out of curiosity, thinking that you can handle it. You see that your ‘sales rank’ is pleasantly high – let’s say you are at number 1,000. Thinking this is a good omen you go back the next day to see if you have climbed any higher – you have, you are now down to three figures. You experience a ludicrously pleasant rush of optimism and now they’ve got you.
The next time you tune in you have plummeted, maybe in the space of just a few hours, to number 10,000. How can this be? You are immediately filled with angst. Has your publisher failed to send them a new order? Has a bad review appeared somewhere and halted sales in their tracks? Or are you simply doomed to a future of abject failure, your children destined to beg on the streets?
You tentatively go back in a few hours later and, miracle of miracles, you are back in three figures. You are high again, thrilled with yourself and the world. Now you are Amazon’s slave. It will only be a matter of time before you are unable to stop yourself from checking in almost every hour. It will become a new distraction from the job of writing as irresistible as making another cup of coffee (each cup a little stronger than the last, but that’s another story).