El Arte De Tocar El Amazon

from Raquel Rivera
to wayne marshall, Deborah Pacini Hernandez
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:38 AM
subject riddle me this

Hi dear compis.

I still don’t quite understand how the amazon sales work, but I got a big kick out of seeing us #1 in salsa and and #1 reggae. And #11 in rap.

* Amazon.com Sales Rank: #53,648 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories: (What’s this?)
#1 in Books > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Ethnic & International > Salsa
#1 in Books > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Reggae
#11 in Books > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Rap

Oh, and did you hear about a “reggaeton” entry being added to the 2009 Merriam-Webster dictionary?
http://reggaetonica.blogspot.com/2009/07/reggaeton-in-merriam-webster-dictionary.html

abrazos,
Raq

from wayne marshall
to Raquel Rivera
cc Deborah Pacini Hernandez
date Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:46 PM
subject Re: riddle me this

Jajaja, I just clicked on the salsa bestsellers link and we’re already trailing a Lord of the Rings piano book (WTF?). But on the up-side, we are ahead of such deservedly high ranking salsa tomes as El Arte De Tocar El Clarinete/The Art of Clarinet Playing (Spanish Edition) by Raúl Gutierrez and Creative Guitar 1: Cutting Edge Tech (v. 1) by Sanctuary Press. Hmmm.

And we now seem to be #4 on the reggae chart, behind three Bob Marley books (actually #3 is just the Kindle version of #2). Considering that 7 of the 10 reggae bestsellers are books about Marley, that’s pretty decent placement.

At any rate, this has got to be an indicator of something — and something more than Amazon’s surprisingly crappy metadata. Also, the books in the rap section are more solid for some reason, so getting up to #11 on that chart is not too shabby, fwiw. (Of course, we’re now down to #20, so…)

As for the dictionary entry, I’m glad they agreed with us on orthography. Pretty funny/telling that it made it into Merriam-Webster before the RAE. That Solo Para post is hilarious.

w