Amazon Bestseller Day (Monday 2/18/08) went very well, and I'm very grateful to everyone who purchased one or more copies.

Amazon updates its bestseller rankings every hour, and I wasn't tracking it every hour during the day, only during the evening while I was staying with my daughter in her Chicago apartment. She took some screen captures which I'll post later.

Here's how the rankings work: There's one overall ranking, showing how the book matches up with every other book at Amazon. When no sales have happened for a day or two, that ranking falls to around #350,000, which shows you roughly how many titles there are at Amazon.  This overall ranking always appears on the book's page, below the stats in the Product Details section.

Bestseller rankings work a little differently: they only appear when a book has reached the top 100 in its category. They appear as links that you can visit to see all the bestsellers in a particular category.

When I first offered Practically Shameless for sale at Amazon, the system asked me to place it in 3 categories. I found it very hard to choose the 3 categories -- it could easily have fit into at least a dozen. Here are the categories I chose and the highest rankings I saw on Bestseller Day -- in other words, the book might have ranked higher during an hour in which I didn't check:

1) Health Mind & Body -- Psychology & Counseling -- Movements (ranked #2) -- Jungian (ranked #1)

2) Parenting & Families -- Parenting (ranked #95) -- Emotions & Feelings (ranked #8)

3) Health Mind & Body -- Self-Help -- Personal Transformation (ranked #58)

The last of these 3 categories is the largest, I believe, and also containing the most prestigious competitors -- it contains books like John Bradshaw's Healing the Shame that Binds You and Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People, which have been selling for decades. I'm honored to have shared the bestseller list with titans like these.