November Wankery 2: Blogs ‘n Books

We’ll start with books, since there are fewer graphs.  As always, you’ll have to click to make this giant sumbeesh legible:

So: 533 downloads or print purchases, making November the second-best month of the year, behind only September’s 553.  37 sales over Starbase Indy, which was nice.  Now, granted, most of those were free downloads, not paid, but I think by this point I have ample evidence that the giveaways are bumping print sales, too– and as I’ve demonstrated several times, my books sell better on KDP Select than they do when I spread them out.  (As always: want one of my books in a format other than Kindle?  Email me.  We’ll figure something out.)  On top of that, I had close to 3000 KENP pages, which don’t make me much money– that’s probably another 15-17 bucks– but it ain’t nothing, either.  I still don’t much like the KENP model, but I do like being able to look at that graph and go “Man, somebody’s reading my book right now.”  That’s kinda cool.

So yeah.  I’d prefer for a much higher percentage of my books to be paid sales, but for the moment we’re focusing more on getting my name out there, and since the giveaways are helping sales, I’m going to call this a win.

Now.  Let’s talk about that Syria post.  Which I’m starting to refer to as “the goddamn Syria post” in conversation.  It’s been hugely successful, at least by my standards, and it has done so by utterly screwing my data collection efforts.  Remember when I was saying I was hoping for 100K hits this year?  Yeah:

200K this year looks pretty likely at this point.  I’ve had well over 100K unique visitors, although, weirdly, Likes and comments aren’t close to where they were last year.

My monthly graphs have become trendless.

And look at this bullshit.  I was doing around 300 pageviews a day, 450 on a good day, before that post was written.  My best day was just over 1000 views, on one of my Freshly Pressed days.  Now I’m waking up (I’m writing this at 8:55 in the morning) to just under 1000 hits depending on the day and the post is sine waving.  It’ll be interesting to see if it rebounds again; that previous dip corresponds nicely with Thanksgiving and Black Friday.  The high day?  Just north of 12,500 pageviews, and at one point I was getting 797 hits an hour.

The overall total, which includes December:

So I solved my “I’d like to have 100K views this year” problem by writing a post that will have 100K views all by itself by the end of the week.  Also:

The big driver of all the traffic continues to be Facebook; Twitter doesn’t seem to be too shabby either from the number of notifications I get each day but it’s nowhere close to 34K and that number stopped loading for me a while ago.  I got a brief burst of interest from Reddit one day but that went away (just a couple hundred hits) and Google+ is actually proving it exists.

I shut comments off at 122, at which point people started emailing me.  Emails have ranged from short and supportive to multi-page copy and paste monsters with multiple fonts and multiple colors.  Hitting Delete in Gmail is so easy, guys.  Don’t bother, please.  Oh, and my Likes on my Facebook page have soared, from 150 to close to 200 since the post was written.

Now I just need to find a way to make this replicable.

Anything else anybody wants to know about?  🙂