Last week I was at number 2 in the charts. 

 A book I have written – “Oren and the Art of Onanism” – was at number 2 in the Harper Collins Authonomy website chart.  Of religious books. 

Authonomy is the latest wheeze for publishers to find new talent and road test it on the way.  Aspiring authors can upload their books – whether complete or not – as long as there is at least 10,000 words. 
From there, it is up to you to publicise, draw in readers via your participation in the forums and commenting on the books of others etc.  Your ranking goes up depending on the number of people that “shelf” your book (put it on their top 5 list of books they are reading online) or add you to their “watchlist”. 
If you are lucky you get comments from people who read your book, some suggesting grammatical or spelling changes, others commenting on the story arc, some praising it and increasing your ranking. 
Once a month, the top 5 books on the site are considered by Harper Collins editors.  After all, books that have made it into the top 5 have already demonstrated that there’s a substantial number of people that would considered reading and buying them. Ok, the chances of getting into that top 5 are miniscule.  But it beats the slushpile and the soul destroying search for an agent.  
   
A friend of mine who posts occasional comments here (Spinster of this Parish) has a fabulous book on the site (“Looking for Buttons” – a bittersweet chick lit romp) which reached number two in the chick lit chart and is getting stonking reviews from everyone that reads it.  Seeing this encouraged me to put my own far more esoteric effort onto the site. 
“Oren and the Art of Onanism” is the story of a rather privileged upper middle-class man drifting through life, when everything gets turned upside down by him witnessing the death of a motorcyclist.  Affected by this, by the actions and reactions of his friends and family and other changes in his life, he feels the need to find out if there really is more to life than this. 
And the title?  Well obviously there are some scenes of a sexual nature.  But people get it wrong about the story of Onan in the Bible. 
Onan’s sin is not actually the “spilling of his seed upon the ground”, the act of self-gratification for which his name has become a byword.  It’s going against God’s word  in marrying his brother’s wife, the disobedience to God who had spoken to him that is Onan’s sin – and also Oren’s. 

My friend who read it critically for me felt it was well-written and a very subtle way of telling someone that I once knew that I thought he was a w**ker…  you can judge for yourself.    If you want to read the first 5 chapters of Oren, they are available for free online here

You can choose the categories under which your book can be found.  As my book is “fiction”, “literary fiction” to be more precise, and has a “religious” theme, I put it under those three categories.
So after a week, it reached number 2 in the religious books chart.  It reached about 300 in the literary fiction chart, the one that for me would ”really count”.  but no matter.  I was feeling pretty good.  Very gratifying.  1200th most popular book in the whole of the Authonomy, so again, not too bad given that it’s not exactly a mass market publication.  If you loved the Da Vinci Code then this book is not for you. 

But this weekend the chart was updated again.  Loads of new religious-themed books have been added to the chart this week and I’ve fallen 28 places!  Not just out of the top 2 but out of the top 30!   

The lesson in all this is that you can’t set yourself up to depend on other people for your self-esteem.  While I’m immensely pleased that I achieved a top 2 ranking, I’m also sensible enough to realise that it was only going to be until something better, or at any rate more popular came along. 
But it really brings home to me that the reason that popstars appear to have either depression, egos the size of Jupiter, or both, and why politicians often seem to be paranoid, or teflon-coated, or both. 
I’m grounded by my “real life” – I’ve got things in my life other than my attempts to be a novelist (whether my family, my faith or my paid work) that are not solely reliant on selling the concept of “me”.  So a drop in the chart position that my book holds is not the be all and end all – it’s not losing an election and therefore not having a job and it doesn’t directly affect my income (other than furthering me from the dream of one day being published and living in a big house writing for a living…).

But if you have nothing else – if you are completely dependent on the applause and the positive reinforcement… then hanging onto it would become an obsession.  To lose it would either leave you slightly unhinged or deeply depressed.  And if you stayed at the top and became used to that feeling, if you kept getting that public confirmation that you were right, or that what you had to offer then you’d do everything you could to keep it – popstars giving more and more personal, revealing interviews, politicians going for more and more populist policies…  

So it’s ok.  It’s still a damn good book that deserves a wider audience.
And I can choose either to promote it further, or I can switch my focus to the Wuthering-Heights-if-Jilly-Cooper-had-written-it-as-a-bonkbuster comedy chick lit thing that I’ve got underway…

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