On Friday morning the hardcover edition of Ebenezer was #1,616,013 on the Amazon book best-seller list. It was #5,192 on the Holiday Romance list, #6,078 under Ghost Fiction, and #9,471 among Holiday Fiction entries.
All of these numbers are improvements over the first time I looked, but does it matter in the end? I have always been attracted to best-seller lists, but what do they measure? “Hey Jude” was #1 for three months in 1968. “Those Were The Days” by Mary Hopkin and “Fire” by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown peaked at #2 and never became the top song on the Billboard charts because “Hey Jude” was such a juggernaut. But they’re still terrific songs.
It’s daunting to think there are more than 6,000 books about ghosts — more than 9,000, actually, because my book was #9,184 a couple of weeks ago. It’s a good thing this isn’t a competition.
The drive to have a best-seller — or awards that recognize, say, a Best Picture — makes it feel like a competition, but that’s not why we create, or it shouldn’t be. The act of creation is an innate thing built into us — we are “built in the image” of a Creator, after all — and each of us is a creation engine. We don’t take anything from anyone else when we create something, we pull something from inside ourselves and add to the universe — we don’t subtract from anywhere else, we all just keep adding.
As Wallace D. Wattles once wrote, “You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has now.”
And so, as the first season of Ebenezer’s existence grows to a close, it’s nice to see that it raised a few coins, but the main goal in any act of creativity is to see that “every other man will have more than he has now,” and so I’m gratified to have evidence that I gave something to my fellow humans.
Approaching a new year, may we all be inspired to add something to the universe and fulfill our destinies as creators.
