Which books sell?

Here is my list of best sellers according to Amazon sales ranking:

The ranks may be updated hourly and the ranks fluctuates widely for small sales volumes. You can see the list at Amazon. The ranks of these books are dropping rapidly, maybe due to the holiday season.

The first conclusion is that, history, economics, politics, and social sciences of prostitution don't sell. That's hardly surprising, so I never tried to write about morality of prostitution and legalization, not yet. What's surprising is that the top seller is an old book about tantra, the kind of healing that you can find in LA if you pay for an hour's time. But I think it's a fluke. The other books by the same Author doesn't sell. Maybe people confuse the book with the recent movie about Mary. May be the cover and title is just too intrigued.

Surprisingly, the unmistakable leader are the pimps. Sorry that we all lose out to the masters again. Not that many people have the qualifications and live to tell their story. Maybe it's not surprising at all. It's the usual male fantasy. For some it's their only role model. If you know what's an Annual Player's Ball, when you get your first credit card, you may rush to order the book and build a book shelf to put it on.

The call girl diary and confession type of books don't sell as well as I think. The odd one out is the ivy league call girl confession. Maybe it's new so the weekly sales volume are much better than those of Tracy Quan and her British counterpart Belle de Jour. However nobody knows how exactly the ranks are computed, and obviously the rank also reflects the total sales over the years. Obviously Tracy sold a lot of books via the book stores instead of Amazon, so she should be doing well since 2001(?). Also there are different versions of her same books that may be ranked separately.

For call girl books to sell, it have to be glamorous, like Tracy's books, or the fallen angel type like the ivy league book. Nobody is interested in Nevada brothels.

The surprising sellers are those self help books, you don't just enjoy the book, but getting something out of it. It's a worrying trend that "The business side of escorting" sells that well. Are there that many girls thinking of trying out escorting?

The old favorite turn outs to be client self help books. From how to be a better client to where to get laid in the world. It's not a surprise as there are many more potential johns than johns, and in turn many more than escorts.

So if you want to be popular, you have to appeal to the amateur johns and hookers. If you are an amateur john or hooker, you are also free from the stigmas of seasoned professionals. But then amateurs are boring, preferring to lurk around or mail order books. So the hero or heroin has to be a glamorous amateur, fallen from grace, who can't shut his or her mouth, and later turned into a glamorous pimp or madam.

The UK ranking is very different:

You can find the list also in Amazon UK. Note that these books rank a lot higher than in US. One reason could be that there are just more books in USA. Obviously there are more but not orders of magnitude more. I think the Brits are just more interested in prostitution.

However, the best sellers are those call girl dairy/confession books. And the Brits are hungry for new ones. Who needs help when the line is so easy to cross? If you want to try punting, there are so many places you can go on your way home, without fear or prosecution. If you want to try escorting, say if you are a student or a nurse, just call and join the local agencies which specialize in that.