On the nullity of Amazon rankings

People tell me, as Pericles Commission nears release, to ignore the book's Amazon ranking.  Which I didn't even know existed until people told me to ignore it.

So this made me find out about Amazon rankings.  As far as I can tell, the advice is right; Amazon ranking appears to be a poor implementation of a bad idea.  The concept is that every single book is stack ranked based on sales.  And not only sales, but using a projection algorithm based on buying trends.

So my humble debut historical mystery is stack ranked in the same group as, for example, the latest Twilight.  Because, you know, it makes perfect sense that teenage girls who're into emotionally dysfunctional vampires will also want to read an ancient murder mystery, right?   Also, the same people want to read the latest textbook on calculus and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

You could make this work, I suppose, if you stack ranked within genres.  So that ancient mysteries were ranked only among themselves, and dysfunctional vampires only sucked each others' blood.  But even then there's a problem because the 7th book in a successful series comes with an existing audience.  A book late in a series could totally outsell a profitable newcomer and yet still underperform on expectations.

So what does this ranking system measure?  Actually, nothing, except perhaps a profitability projection for the bookseller.

Surprisingly, it seems nobody can tell how many copies of any book have actually been sold.  The publisher knows how many have been shipped to stores, but not how many have left the shop.  Books are sold on consignment; the store could in the future return some to the warehouse.   There's a system called BookScan which does measure sales in something approaching real time, but it doesn't monitor all stores.

So for months, until there's an audit, nobody knows the sale numbers!


(I stole the blog post title from a letter written by Roger Bacon in the 13th century, entitled On The Nullity Of Magic.)

G. Corby, now available in a potty near you

All right, it might not be near you, but I am published on a bathroom wall.

Regular reader and commenter Rachel is editor of the erudite publication, Poets in the Potty, at Indiana University. The latest edition of Poets in the Potty includes my short-short "Hello My Friend, You Have Won..." which originally appeared on Rammenas. I am humbled to be on the same page as Emily Dickinson and Ogden Nash.

Anyone within range of Indiana University should immediately go there and rush to the bathroom to read the latest.

Rachel is awarded 10 points for getting me into print before St. Martin's Press.

Poets in the Potty is a seriously good idea. It wouldn't hurt for a few corporates to be doing this.

And here is the final print run:

Halley's Comet sighted by the Greeks?

So there's a story going about that the ancient Greeks may have spotted Halley's Comet. It comes from a paper published by two academics at Brigham Young University named Graham and Hintz.

The claim relies on an excerpt from Meteorology, written by Aristotle, that a rock the size of a wagon fell to earth in the second year after the 78th Olympiad, and that a philosopher named Anaxagoras predicted it. This caught my attention as much because I use Anaxagoras as a character in The Ionia Sanction! Anaxagoras was a pre-Socratic philosopher. Though only just pre-Socratic; young Socrates was aged between 2 and 4 years old when the meteor hit. Anaxagoras was also well known among the ancient Greeks for his wild idea that all matter was composed of infinitesimally small particles.

The suggestion that Anaxagoras could have predicted a meteor fall is obviously rubbish. But Aristotle mentions in passing that a comet was visible in the sky when the rock fell. As it happens this is in the window for when a Halley's Comet flyby would be expected.

The best you can say is it might have been Halley's comet. If so, it's the earliest known sighting.

The Ionia Sanction

A small team of highly trained experts has been at work on what to call Book 2 of the Hellene Mysteries, which is what I call the series even if no one else does!  Book 2 will be released with, no doubt, another beautiful cover from St Martin's Minotaur, on which will be the words...

The Ionia Sanction

Why Ionia?  Because that's the ancient province in which most of the action takes place.  Also, The Ionia Sanction is in the same style as The Pericles Commission, so there's the virtue of consistency. 

These images are taken from Atlas pour servir a L'histoire Grecque de E. Curtius, by Auguste Bouche Leclercq, 1888.  As you can see I got hold of an original edition and took some photos.  The book, by the way, is both a thing of beauty and incredibly informative.  If you can find a copy at a library it's well worth a look.

First off, here's a map showing Ionia.  It's the purple section in the middle.  As you can see, Ionia is fundamentally the west coast of Turkey.

The yellow province directly below Ionia is Doria.  The pink province directly above Ionia is Aeolia.  

Almost all the Greek cities were founded by people from one of two super-tribes: the Dorians and the Ionians.  The Dorians were the people of the Peloponnese, and the Ionians were the people who lived in Attica, plus the islands and the west coast of Turkey.  The west coast of Turkey was named Ionia, after the tribe which colonized it.  

You might think that Doria was colonized by Dorians, but that would be far too sensible.  Doria was inhabited by Karians, a non-Greek people who absorbed Greek culture going back even to Mykenaean times, but who themselves were not Greek.  Doria did have a few Dorians on the premises, hence the name by which the Greeks called it.  The Aeolians likewise were not originally Greek.  And now I'll exercise some self-control and stop talking about other provinces, or this blog post will turn into an entire book.

Here is where Ionia lies relative to Athens.  Attica, with Athens as its capital, is the purple splodge on the left.  Ionia is the elongated pinkish splodge on the right.  In between is the Aegean Sea.

Athens heavily supported Ionia after the Persians came along and took control of the province.  The Athenians and the Ionians, after all, were of one blood, all members of the Ionic super-tribe, and the Athenians believed overwhelmingly in freedom at all costs ("Live Free or Die" is the motto of New Hampshire, but it could have been written for the Athenians).  The Ionians revolted against the Persians, which ended badly and the ringleaders who didn't flee were executed.   The only Ionian city not to rebel against Persia was Ephesus.  After the revolt, the Ephesians were rewarded by the Great King with permission to rule themselves.  Ephesus thus attained a very special position indeed: a Hellene city within the Persian Empire but with self-rule.  For this reason, in the stories I've treated Ephesus as the Checkpoint Charlie of the ancient world.  Which probably isn't all that far wrong.

So here's a blow-up of Ephesus and Magnesia.  The river directly below Magnesia is the Meander River, which tends to...er...meander.

When we hit on The Ionia Sanction I immediately did a quick search for similar titles, and came up at once with The Ionian Mission, which is one of the titles in Patrrick O'Brian's brilliant series of Napoleonic sea stories.  I should have realized instantly because his entire series sits on the bookcase in my office.

The highly trained team of title thinkers were literary agents Janet Reid, Suzie Townsend, Joanna Volpe, and FinePrint Godsends Meredith Barnes and Judith Engracia.  Thank you, Ladies!  Editor Kathleen and Keith Kahla did the final approval, since it is, in fact, their right to pick the title!  A lot of people don't realize that cover and title fall into the publisher's realm.  I'm enormously lucky to have editors who've turned author consultation into an art form.

The value of a Classical drachma

Imagine walking into a modern Bureau de Change and handing over a one drachma coin from Classical Athens, and asking for US dollars. What's the exchange rate?

(For the purposes of the hypothetical, let's disregard the inherent value of an antique coin.)

Modern exchange rates are determined by the relative popularity of the currencies, which normally depends on factors like GDP, inflation rates, and central bank interest rates. We could try the same, except adjusting for inflation over 2,500 years and accounting for minor social influences such as the fall of the Roman Empire is clearly a loser.

So I'll try to do it by equating incomes.

There are plenty of sources from Classical Athens to say the average wage of an Athenian worker was a drachma a day. Athenians didn't work every day. They didn't have public holidays like we do, but they did have a lot of religious festivals. No one much except slaves did any work during the Great Dionysia, for example. I'll arbitrarily assign 330 working days.

I found a 2005 US census which says the average yearly income of people in full time emplyment was USD 49,069.

If we take the value of average wages to be equivalent, then the Bureau de Change should give us about USD 150 for our coin.

The exchange rate of the modern Greek drachma, as I write this, is GRD 1 = USD 0.0037.

So 1 Classical Athenian drachma has the purchase power of 40,540 modern drachmae, which looks bad until you realize this gives a notional inflation rate, year on year, over 2,500 years, of 0.0425%

That's pretty good inflation control!