Proving Old Adages: Any Publicity Is Good Publicity

Early this morning, my Portfolio-mate Jeff Bercovici pointed out that Gawker Media's book is not selling so well.

Which of course meant the book's sales ranking on Amazon had nowhere to go but down (which is a good thing).

At 12:50 p.m. Gawker noted the book's Amazon rank was 107,116.

Forty minutes later a commenter said the book had jumped in ranking to 40,852.

That's a nice gain, but how many books sold is that? While gyrations like this happen to books that don't do well and suddenly see some sales, according to fonerbooks.com, the jump amounts to moving from about 6 sales-per-week to about 12 or 13 sales-per-week. A 100% gain in something is rarely bad, but, at these low numbers, it's probably less than the business side of Gawker Media would hope for.
(Go here for a fine explanation of the new Amazon ranking system and a disclaimer on the above numbers.)

But could this be the beginning of a surge for The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media? Well, as of 3 p.m. its ranking had slipped back a bit to 46,618.