Fiction Best Sellers Updated

My Squidoo lens Fiction Best Sellers has been updated to reflect sales ending the week of March 19, 2011. Things were pretty quiet this time around, with only one new book in the top 10 and only one or two new books in the rest of the list.

I had developed a new button-looking thing (actually a very short paragraph with rounded-corner borders) for the lens I did for Wendy Rule earlier this week. With a little minor tweaking it works just fine for books as well as CDs. I had noticed that any text I created below the boxed text descriptions would start under the CD image on Wendy's lens, so I used that little feature to get the button under the book image as well. The only catch is the description box has to be longer than the book cover image, otherwise the button ends up below the text. So sometimes I need to put in some line breaks to make the description box long enough. I think it looks pretty good and draws more attention to the Buy now from Amazon.com link.

Diary of a Mad Fat Girl

The self-published first novel and ebook-only Diary of a Mad Fat Girl by Stephanie McAfee, which appeared at #31 on the list last week is still on the list this week at #32. Amazon has given it their Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and Stephanie says she's getting communications from literary agents that are not rejection letters.

As one of the last of the big spenders, I decided to risk a whole 99 cents and just bought the book for my Nook from Barnes & Noble. It'll probably be a fun read even though it's not my usual fare.

I still think it's pretty cool that a self-published ebook only first novel has made it to one of The New York Times best seller lists.  It's not an easy thing to do.