A Percentage Means Nothing

Recently it seems one of my works achieved the honor of making the "What do Customer's Ultimately Buy..." sectioning by a notable online retailer and although I find some tiny bit of satisfaction that I've finally been *considered* for such honor, I also found I had to reflect upon what all those little percentage points didn't include.

I screenshotted (is that even a word) the image (below) of what I saw during my last visit and, gee-whiz … one percent. Ugh! One lousy stinking percent.

But then I thought, there's Dans' book, and Judy's, Francine's ... all good books by very good authors I know and so being only one percent out of the hundreds of other books being sold just by these three alone on one specific day isn't all that bad ... I guess.

Yet the percentages still bother me for personally I don't believe they accurately reflect everything in a consumer's decision-making process and because of that, when you begin to think about it, they don't truly portray the larger picture because the numbers don't tell you who did buy my book. Or why they bought it. Or how much it helped them. Or if it saved them money, heartache ... or worse.

They don't let you know what they were looking for when then visited my sales page. If they only popped over on whim while window-shopping. Followed a link for a "better deal" from another book's page. If they were actually shopping for a book in my subject. Or even if they came from my website directly.

There's no indication of whether they came back to buy it later, or bought it cheaper at another venue after comparison shopping, bought the less-expensive ebook version instead, and it surely doesn't tell you if they kept it, gave it as a gift, or lent it to a friend ... or even if they threw it in the trash.

All it tells you is out of the unknown amount of visitors who came to this one specific page for whatever unknown reason, only one percent decided to buy my book ... and ninety-nine percent didn't.

But I'm okay with that because even though I know the numbers don't reflect the whole picture, I'll still proudly take my little one percent (even if I choose not to take it quietly lol) .

And as for the numbers?

Although I still believe they're somewhat misleading, I do know most people who want to buy my book are smart enough not to allow themselves to be solely influenced by random computations ... but even so, to the rest of the audience I'd like to pass along this little piece of wisdom before I sign off:

Before making any decision based only on the numbers, remember, unless all the details are included, many times a percentage of something doesn't really mean anything at all!


Trust the reviews, critics, experts--and have fun shopping!