For the past week, I’ve been watching my little book as it has climbed out of obscurity and onto it’s very first Amazon Top 100 List. After my first free day, it rode the obligatory bump out of the hundreds of thousands in the rankings to hover in the 3500-4500 range for Paid In Kindle Store. I had absolutely no frame of reference for what all this meant until the book popped up on the Top 100 African American Literature and Fiction Books list:

#51 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > African American

The above is where it was when I checked at this writing. However, it’s been in the low forties a couple of times, and the thing I found absolutely more fascinating and humbling than anything is the fact that through the week, it has landed on the same page as Toni Morrison! In fact, it was right next to her once, and I might have taken a screen shot of that, because that might not happen again in my lifetime. What an utterly incongruous position to be in.

Mind you, I have no idea what algorithm, rubric, or whatever Amazon uses to decide such things. I’ve just been blindly accepting of whatever ranking they’ve deigned to assign to me. One thing I know for sure is that someone out there is buying this little book, and I want to thank all the early acquirers, readers, and reviewers who are pushing it up the food chain. One can always hope to be on the Top 100 Paid in Store list, right?

In the interim, I guess I’ll just keep watching what happens and enjoying my place on this wonderful list while I’m there. It means so much to me, because it is validation somehow that my own accept me. And that feels good!