Only 3% of British books are bought online but one thing is for sure - 100% of British authors with an internet connection keep a very close eye on it indeed. It's not easy working at home in front of a computer. Richard & Judy only takes you up to lunchtime, and those two friends of the homeworker, Freecell and Minesweeper, will cramp your writing hand sooner or later. So, what better than to keep an eye on your children - and at the same time, those of your competitors? Checking your book page on amazon almost feels like working.
Why is it so compulsive? Well, for starters it updates your chart position every hour, on the hour. Not only that, but the "people who bought this book also bought_ xxx" section connects you to your nearest rivals for comparative purposes. Even people like my good friend Andrew Mueller, whose Rock and Hard Places rarely budges from its hotly contested position at 37,692, have to constantly take a look. Just in case in the last half hour there's been a flurry and you're outselling Harry P. It could happen - if everyone in the world died except your closest relatives.
Of course, what one would never do is order lots of copies to influence the chart position because "you can always cancel it later".
But the chart is only the first half of the story. Next stop is the comments section. Oh my God! Normally people read books and forget about them. If anyone can be bothered to pick up pen and paper to approach the author, the more green crayonish letters are filtered out by publishing staff before they reach you. But amazon has changed all that. Now it takes about 16 seconds to ruin somebody's day. Don't believe me? Look at the review page for Honeymoon by Amy Jenkins. Would you please leave that poor girl alone?
Just as there are guidelines for writing reviews, there ought to be guidelines for reading them. At a rough estimate, discount the bottom six. They will all be from an unnamed "reader from London", will grant five stars and have a short message along the lines "this is the best book ever".
If you'd just read a book so great that you had to go to a website and make public your thoughts, don't you think your emotion, love and excitement might spill over into more than just a short paragraph? These are, in fact, hastily assembled friends and family members and, occasionally for the very desperate, publishers. Think of them as greetings cards.
Also, be wary of anything over the top - literary chums Richard Mason and Jamie Holland were caught out when Mason wrote reviews comparing Jamie's book, One Thing Leads to Another, to Tchaikovsky, using hotmail pseudonyms compiled from his own characters.
One-star reviews, if well argued, are fair enough, but if they say things like "this book is trite and pointless and its author always left her washing-up in the sink", then they are probably best avoided.
There is also the double-edged review of your book with the sting in its tail: eg, "I really hated this nonsense and much preferred XXX". XXX will always be the massively successful tome of your nearest rival. (Don't forget, you can find out who this is by checking the "customers who bought this book also bought..." box). If you're really in the mood to piss off an author, this is an excellent way to do it.
Four stars is the acceptable average star level. Five is like getting a first-class degree: you're trying too hard; or you're a crazy sci-fi saga writer, your fans draw geneaology charts for your characters and have never had sex. Three can be OK if you've got a case like Adele Parks' merciless morality tale, Playing Away, where readers either think this is the best thing ever, or that it is the devil's work, best burned.
The "I am the author" button always had me hopelessly intrigued before I could legitimately press it. Being a well-behaved girl, I never did, but apparently some nutter pretended to be Phillip Pullman, the genius behind His Dark Materials, and filled a whole page with craziness. A friend of mine is constantly dithering about whether to press it for Mein Kampf or The Bible.
As a long-time amazon contributor, I stopped writing negative reviews the first time a newspaper remarked that I looked like Gail Tilsley, but the few I did do seem set to haunt the web pages for ever. Now, I only write wholehearted endorsements of things I love. Except for AA Gill books, but he is asking for it. Well, I say books in plural - nobody who has read one would dream of picking up the other.
My father was grumbling recently about not receiving a response to a letter that he sent a famous author. "Don't worry," I said. "Whatever you want to get across, amazon.co is the place to do it. And not only will the author see it, but all her peers and rivals will see it too. Probably in the next half-hour."
• The best antidote for amazon addiction I can find - which is also conveniently time consuming - is at Brains4zombies.com
