"best" sellers

March/April is a very important time of year for authors, because we receive royalty statements from our various publishers. If we're lucky, we even receive a small amount of royalties, though the more likely version is that the statement will inform us that we still owe money.

This year, I have finally managed to create a spreadsheet of all my book sales, which is endlessly fascinating, as I can now get the sheet to calculate all kinds of statistics for me. For instance, the best year (so far) for sales of my books was 2001.

I've also taken this opportunity to update my personal "best" sellers list (note that none of my books ever came close to troubling any real bestsellers lists!). Maybe I should call it the leastpoorsellers list. Anyhow, to avoid confusion I have now combined different editions of identical title (e.g. hardback and paperback ed. of Life on the Edge) and come to the following top 5:

1. Travels to the Nanoworld
2. Life on the Edge
3. Light and Life
4. Exzentriker des Lebens
5. Astrobiology

Note that Astrobiology may still rise in the charts as it is still selling. Amazingly, if I listed the books by the sales in the first year of publication of a given edition, I would arrive at exactly the same top 5. So their fate is sealed by the end of the first Christmas sale period!

Also, congratulations are due to Ken Derham of Plenum Publishing (now part of Kluwer, which has probably been swallowed up by some even bigger fish), as he commissioned the top 2 titles of this list.