I distribute a good portion of my books through Amazon and most of those are the Kindle version. Amazon provides graphs to track sales. So I know when someone buys a copy but not who it might be. One graph gives the number of copies bought each day, but the second graph is more interesting. It depicts the activity through Kindle Unlimited, a service in which a subscriber can download as much as they want of selected titles like mine for a monthly fee. For those downloads, I get royalties on the pages read. So the graph depicts the number of pages read each day.

This graph tells a more interesting story, that of reading habits. When I have a busy number of days on the chart, it’s harder to decipher. For example, one day may be 400 pages. Since my book has but 360 pages, more than one person is reading that day. However, over the past few days, it seems a solitary reader is active. There are 25 pages one day, 45 the next, 20 after that. I imagine a commuter with a Kindle reading what he or she can on the way to work, or a busy mother that takes in a few pages each night.

None of this speaks of a New York Times best seller. Those numbers are far beyond mine. Yet, it pleases me to understand that every day, someone, somewhere, is reading my writing. To provide a little entertainment each day to someone you don’t know is the reward a writer seeks.