A person can go crazy watching numbers too closely. It continues to plug along, staying on the charts in the middle of the mil-sci-fi and space-opera second page of the top 100, floating around between #25 and #35 mostly, while bouncing between #3000 and #8000 in overall sales rank. I know there is some lag, and some weighting on sales that show what "direction" they are trending, but it's totally non-transparent as to why exactly it moves sometimes. I've seen it move up over a period when nothing sold, and down when it has sold several copies, so obviously it depends on sales relative to other books.
Not having any idea how a buyer found the book is also frustrating, but unless I get famous I doubt Amazon will readily share that info with me. Guess I gotta get famous, then :-).
Reviews continue to be good. The three 4-star reviews each gave a perfectly valid reason to dock it one star, and I really can't argue with them. I'd count my self lucky to get another hundred reviews like them. Two thought it was a great story, but didn't like the screenplay-like format, one thought the writing and story was solid, but not quite 5-star worthy (needed to be Heinlein or Jefferson level prose to earn a 5-star, which it isn't). Not sure why, but several copies have been returned. Nothing to worry about, just curious why. I've heard that between 1/2% and 6% get returned, and after peaking at 2% it's been inching down, though doing stats with small numbers isn't very accurate. I won't "trust" the return numbers until I have a statistically significant sales number, preferably over 3,000.
Guess I should go start writing a new book.