Jennie Ensor's Author Website

First I want to wish all my blog’s readers – whether you’ve been with me from the start (have a special Christmas kiss) or you are freshly following, intermittent or have dropped by for a quick peek – a peaceful and contented Christmas. Or a jolly, merry, boozy one if you prefer.

Now I want you to imagine this post strewn with enticing decorations and drifting snowflakes. Apologies for the lack of festive adornments. Unfortunately, I can’t snap the Christmas tree as it’s not up yet as I’ve been spending far too much time on book-related stuff – tweeting about this week’s price cut, working on a press release, tweaking my bio and dithering over which author pic to put on Amazon… I’ve been distracted from the Christmas thing due to spending much of the week in a state of flummox bordering on outright disbelief. The reason – since Blind Side has been on sale at 99p last Friday night and was mentioned in a promotional email, it zipped up to the giddy heights of the UK Kindle charts, reaching Amazon Bestseller Rank #239 in Kindle paid books sometime on Monday morning (19 December). Which is totally f***ing amazing considering all the thousands of e-books sold on Amazon!

The book also stormed up its category listings (it got to 13 in Women’s crime fiction and into the top 30 of  women’s psychological fiction and others) and climbed a great deal in Amazon.com, where it has been languishing for months.

I still don’t understand what the ABR is exactly, except that it indicates a book’s sales relative to all the other same-format books sold through Amazon. The main thing is that the lower the rank the better, like music charts. The ranking is recalculated every hour, which is a bugger. After finding out at bedtime Sunday night that my book was selling so well I was too excited to sleep and spent the rest of the night chatting to friends on Facebook and screenshotting my book beside some of my favourite authors such as Stephen King and Ian McKewan.

At time of writing (9.50am Friday 23rd December) Blind Side is selling less but is still in the top 100 of its categories, which is great because it can be found by anyone scrolling through the ‘Bestselling’ pages, if anyone ever does apart from obsessive author types.

Enough of this bragging and strumpetting – I’ll leave you to wrap those pressies and over-indulge in sherry, etc. Suffice to say I’ve had my wish of finding a bunch more readers granted, if somewhat dramatically. I’ll risk adding my inspirational message of the year – if you really want something go for it, don’t stop because it seems unlikely. You never know, it just might happen.