Commandment 11: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Fellow Jews Amazon Ranking

Everything was fine. Then I published a book. Not just any book. A book of Jewish cartoons. A book of Jewish humor. Although it’s just over a hundred pages between two pieces of cardboard, don’t tell me it’s not significant. Hell  no. For me, this is “War and Peace” and Jonathan Franzen’s entire oeuvre rolled into one. And we might as well throw in Augie March. So, I did what any author would do. Typed its title, “Kvetch as Kvetch Can,” into that little Amazon search bar and hit return. I then scrolled down down down the page for the all-important number. “Holy Freeholie,” methinks. There are that many books! But, something amazing happens. Even though it’s well into five figures, sometimes six, it figures as a top 100 seller in one category. Humor/Religious. OK, it’s not Fiction/Literary or even Fiction/Pulp, but it’s something. Sure my competition are funny books about Christians (a few), Muslims (fewer) and Buddhists (fewist.) But here’s the rub. Lots of my competition in this brutal division is from fellow Tribesmen (and women.) And all of a sudden, I find myself stalking their rankings. Me, a stalker! I was even stalking someone who blurbed me! Talk about ungracious. But the really sad thing — there’s nothing I can do about it. Short of pounding a few of my books onto my already battle-scared MasterCard (and I am not above doing that, I tell you) I just have to sit in front of the pixels and stew. It’s not that I don’t admire, love, relish, laugh at, chortle over, applaud, approve, and endorse every single book on the Humor/Religious list. It’s just that my responses to their rankings are often less than humorous and certainly less than pious. Who knew? Who knew?

Excuse me, another hour has just rolled over and they are updating the rankings. Gotta go.