I am an Amazon best-selling author

 

It’s true, I am.

Look:

A best-selling author who clearly isn’t a best-selling screenshot capturer, earlier.

This best-selling author status comes with caveats – I’ve got caveats coming out of my ears. It couldn’t be any other way, though, not really, I couldn’t be a best-selling author without caveats coming out of my ears. Such caveats include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

1. It’s tenuous and niche as hell. I am the best-selling author in a small ‘Card Games’ sub-section of Amazon and have only been there over the last day or two. If the handful of people who I’ve browbeaten into buying my book refuses to grow, my best-selling author status will evaporate by the end of the weekend.
2. You don’t have to sell many copies to become a best-selling author in a niche sub-section. I couldn’t, for example, buy an island with my royalties. Nor could I buy a plane ticket to an island. I couldn’t even pay for a taxi to the airport. I could afford to buy some stamps and put them on postcards and send them from an island but that, seriously, is about it.
3.  It’s not really a book. Perhaps this should have been at the top of these caveat-bullet-points. Notes from the Poker Trenches is a collection of poker columns from 2012/2013 that have been annotated. These annotations have allowed the 2018 me to emotionally and psychologically beat up the 2012/2013 me. This has been somewhat enjoyable; 2018 me has liked doing this.
4. Seriously, it’s not really a book. It’s self-published and so I’m not sure it qualifies as a proper book.
5. The cover is an homage to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. It’s not just chucked together because I (a) couldn’t afford a cover designer, (b) was incapable of designing a cover myself or (c) just had some vague feeling that “the words should speak for themselves”.

So, yes, caveats. Over the next week or so I will be detailing the process, from the seedling of an idea (in this instance, someone suggesting I collate a bunch of my old poker columns), through formatting (easy), cover design (even easier), publication (press a button that says ‘Publish’) and marketing (this post). Bet you can’t wait.

In the meantime, if anyone fancies maintaining my status as a best-selling author then please feel free to click on this highlighted bit here and part with £1.99. Seriously, it would make me happier than you could imagine.