The Gift that Keeps on Contorting

JonnyX went out to see Craig Clevenger do his reading at Powell’s the other day. Although he hasn’t blogged it yet, he and a few other attendees wrote up their experiences on the Chuck Palahniuk board. At this moment, the final posting in the thread is Craig himself.

It remains interesting to me to see how long Contortionist’s Handbook stays in the Amazon top 10,000 of sales rank. It blipped up in there during the Technorati rampage and still remains there weeks after dropping out of that list. I’ve taken to checking on it multiple times per day, and it seems like lately that it is hovering in the 3-4K range consistently. It’s long since gotten past the point of being some statistical anomaly – someone is buying this book and they keep on doing it consistently over a long period of time. It’s beginning to look possible that this one weekend of Merry Prankster style manipulation of Technorati might have long-running positive benefits for the sales of the book.

Like I’ve said a few times now, you can’t generalize this. It wouldn’t work on a book that doesn’t incite such fierce loyalty and strong reactions. My best guess for the mechanism of the books sales increase is 2nd and 3rd order effects of the sales spike. The copy that started it all, the one purchased by a coworker on my recommendation, has been through 4 readers now whose reactions ranged from loving it to liking it a lot. I’m guessing that those extra copies that sold during the surge are now circulating about and generating new word of mouth and new sales. If not this, I have no idea what can possibly be causing it. Whatever it is, I hope it puts a little more cash in the pockets of Brother Clevenger so he can keep writing his brilliant and beautifully demented fictions for as long as possible. We need them.

Now I’m waiting desperately for Dermaphoria to come out (long wait, he’s still writing it) and hoping that he’ll be coming to Chicago one of these fine days. Unlike JonnyX, I will take CC up on the offer to hang out after the reading.