A brief bit of blogwankery

On October 16, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Sometime this weekend– possibly today, although it would require someone or a few someones to go a’wandering through the archives for a while, or looking at cosplay pictures— the site will surpass last year’s traffic. Which would be nice! That big spike in 2015 and a good chunk of 2016’s bar is all from a single post that went nuts, but in general I’ve considered 60K a nice round number to shoot for each year, and while I didn’t get there last year I should get a decent way past that this year unless the site collapses for some reason. I’m already up on visitors from last year, but I still need about 400 more hits to catch it in traffic, and there’s a bit of a way to go for Likes and Comments.

This site doesn’t make me any money, mind you, other than second-hand by occasionally driving readers to my books; I tried to go through WordPress’ monetization application and was denied because it turns out I say too many swears, and I’m not going to stop swearing for a few extra bucks a month. But it’s definitely nice to see traffic up. That’s probably an artifact of me posting more– last year was, uh, a bit of a bust in that regard, what with every aspect of my life imploding at once, and as of right now I haven’t missed a day since April 5th.

I was about to go into more metrics, but we’re close enough to the end of the year that I’ll put that off until my end-of-2020 blogwanking post. For now, I thought I’d acknowledge the milestone and leave it at that. Now go troll through my archives and get me over the hump today. 🙂

In which this took all day: Sales n’ Spreadsheets #blogwanking

On January 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing8 Comments

This will be tiny and illegible, but those of you who care can click on it for a larger and actually readable edition. You still may have to scroll a bit, since I work with a 27″ monitor and this image is all sorts of horizontal:

Basically, a day of fiddling with Excel and every sales report I can get anyone to give me has convinced me that I need to start fresh and on my own with 2015, as not nearly enough of the data I have for 2014 can give me specific dates on which I made sales– or, at least, dates on which I made sales anywhere other than Amazon. Smashwords’ date data seems to fall into a black hole after 30 days, so I’ll have to keep track of that separately and on my own if I want to be able to see it. Thus, this Excel spreadsheet, which keeps track of each book and each venue the book is available at. I have to manually enter day-by-day sales and then it totals everything up for me; line graphs are on the next sheet.

Interesting fact: As of last night (I had six BA sales yesterday!) I’ve sold more books in January than there are days in January. That’s a first for me if you don’t count the couple of KDP Select free days that I gave Benevolence Archives 1 when it was on Select at Amazon; those garnered hundreds of downloads. If I was able to make BA free at Amazon I would get a lot more visibility for it. Select has been good for Skylights, hands down, no debate, and I suspect when BA 2 launches in April it will be on Select as well.

It remains to be seen if my nonsense is finally starting to catch on a bit, if Select is solely responsible for this, or if people just buy more books in January than they do in December. But it’s probably worth pointing out that my January check from Amazon will probably be at least a fourth of my income from writing in all of 2014. That’s gotta mean things are looking up, right?

And, just for the hell of it: