Amazon offers something close to a million titles that can be bought for the Kindle. Each one has a sales rank, determined by a formula Amazon hasn’t disclosed, except that it’s a combination of total sales over time and the current rate of sales.

My book Fourteen Western Stories has cracked the #10,000 barrier in sales rank. It’s a long way from the top ten, or even the top one hundred, but it’s still startling. My novel Bloodbath, for example, published about a year ago, has a sales rank in the neighborhood of #260,000. Elmore Leonard’s collection of Western stories has a sales rank in the neighborhood of #50,000, although it’s been out for several years.

What’s more, my book has cracked the top one hundred in sales of short story collections, short story collections by single authors and Westerns for the Kindle.

I don’t know how this has happened. I only have three customer reviews, although they’re all positive, and I’m not doing any commercial advertising for the book.

These rankings fluctuate a lot, but somehow the book is finding readers, and I’m very grateful for that fact. I’m especially grateful to friends who’ve bought it and told other friends about it.