Anybody else feel like WordPress isn’t counting traffic properly tonight? Since I put my last post up my likes and comments have been outweighing my page views by something like ten to one, which isn’t actually possible.
Tag: Traffic
Blogwanking and salewanking. Just a lot of wanking, basically.
The sale’s not quite over yet, but I like looking at numbers so let’s do that. With a little bit of luck, I’ll get another sale or two today. I figure I have enough indie authors reading this that somebody ought to find this interesting. Forgive me if you’re not among that group.
Here are my Amazon sales since Skylights launched. Note that this is for both of my books:
As you can see, since a day or two after the book launched, I’ve been good to get a sale in a day, and getting sales two days in a row is unusual. Last week I had one little spike with two sales– someone bought both Benevolence Archives and Skylights within a couple of minutes of each other, if I remember right, but then nothing until this weekend.
So, in terms of absolute numbers, selling seven books? Not great. Selling seven books in a weekend compared to the month that it took to sell seven books before that? I’ll take it.
Most of the sales at Amazon were of Skylights, by the way. I think one of them, maybe, is BA.
Here’s Smashwords, which won’t let me combine stats into one chart. We’ll look at BA first:
Now, keep in mind that Benevolence Archives is free at Smashwords, so each download here represents a full download of the book. By my standards, I feel like it’s done pretty well– days of multiple downloads have been reasonably common lately and I had that one nice spike where I got eleven downloads in a single day. (I have no idea what triggered that, by the way, and I wish I did.) There were a handful of downloads during the sale, but it doesn’t stand out compared to the pattern over the last month all that much.
Here’s Skylights at Smashwords:
(I should note here that you should be able to click on all of these to make ’em bigger.)
The little spike of four downloads in the middle there is the day where I handed out free codes to people who wanted them. In general, Skylights hasn’t done very well at Smashwords, but I’ve been pretty gratified by the number of sample downloads, particularly the bump you see over the last four days during the sale, and the actual sales of the book have been nice, too. I recognize that a lot of those sample downloads aren’t getting read– hell, I haven’t read a lot of the sample chapters I’ve downloaded– but I think Skylights starts off really strong, and I’m confident that if people actually read the first bit they’ll end up downloading the book.
As far as the set-your-own pricing? No one paid the recommended price. We had a few who got it for free (which, again, is fine,) one person paid $2, and one paid $6.99, two dollars above the recommended price. I have not yet nailed down which relative it was that did that. 🙂
I think that later tonight I’m probably going to return the Amazon prices to where they were– you could make the argument that the lower prices were what drove the sales, but when I reduced Benevolence Archives to $0.99 for a few weeks sales didn’t change at all, so I think it’s probably the increased noise I’ve been making over the last four days to get people to buy my books– which I’m not going to be able to keep up, because it’s exhausting. I’m still toying with the idea of leaving Skylights at set-your-own pricing; BA will remain free at Smashwords. We’ll see if I pick up any sales over the next couple of days once I stop shouting about it constantly.
And now, on another note:
This continues to entertain the hell out of me. 2572 views; my second most popular post of all time does not have 1000 yet. Note that it’s not 5:00 yet and the post is already within a hit or two of its best day ever; hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I reloaded after finishing this and found out it was at its best (Edit: yep.) Mondays are huge for the Snowpiercer review because people see the movie over the weekend, hate it, and then go looking for bad reviews of it on Monday. Don’t believe me? Here’s my search queries lately:
There are legions of people out there who hate this movie, and I am their king.
REVEAL YOURSELF!
Okay, seriously, who’s digging through the archives?
Get a bunch of your friends and keep going. 🙂
BY REQUEST: Geography blogwanking
Haven’t posted this map in a while either. There aren’t really any surprises on it, I don’t think, other than the continued refusal of anyone from Kosovo at all ever to come visit my blog. I swear, guys, I’ve been chasing this one: I have Kosovo as a search term in my Reader and I Like every single post that is tagged “Kosovo” and not one single person from Kosovo has come back to my blog from Kosovo to read my blog in Kosovo.
Kosovo.
Also, Svalbard island, but I’m less annoyed by that because I know no one but polar bears actually lives there.
Most of the rest of the places I haven’t had at least one hit from are either third world countries, theocratic dictatorships, or former Soviet bloc countries with -stan in their names, and frequently they’re more than one of those at the same time. Oh, and Cuba, which doesn’t quite fit into any of those categories but also doesn’t surprise me too much.
But seriously, Kosovo. You’re in Europe. There’s no excuse. Come say hi.
Sunday blogwanking
I always feel like there’s no reason for anyone to be interested in these, but they always end up creating some conversation, and I find myself popping in when others do similar posts, so maybe I just don’t know anything about what people find interesting.
That said, the tl;dr version of this post is “not much has changed lately.”
One thing I really wish WordPress would do is institute some sort of chart to keep track of Followers. They’re really inconsistent in how they keep track of your numbers (the phenomenon where I hover around a single number for a couple days then suddenly jump by 30 has not abated) and I’d really like to see some sort of trend. That said, the blog is fifteen months old and has 3800 followers. I should pass 4000 in the next couple of weeks. Still only 76 Likes on Facebook, a number that hasn’t budged in forever; most of the readers seem to be coming directly here, but I still see more referrals from Facebook than any other single source other than Google so I’ll keep the page alive.
So how many of those people are coming here? Let’s look at charts:
Monthly first. I’m still looking to see if I get that huge spike in readership that happened last winter; while there was a bit of a bulge toward the end of the summer (and an expected drop off once school started) traffic has been pretty steady, especially on readers as opposed to page views, since April. I generally get between 5-6000 page views a month and around 2000 visitors. September, I think, is going to end up just barely behind August, mostly due to the several days where I was sick and hardly posted. It won’t be back by much, though.
Here’s weekly views, where it’s even clearer that not much has changed in the last several months. Big drop at the start of school and into that week where I was sick, but other than that everything’s been pretty steady. That week in April where I got 900+ hits in a day for no clear reason at all still stands all by itself.
And, just for the heck of it, here’s Twitter. See if you can figure out at which points I started, and stopped, actively trying to gain followers:
I should probably keep pushing on Twitter until I get above that magic 2k mark, but haven’t had the time and energy for it lately. We’ll see.
At some point I should probably either put some energy into putting together some sort of long-term strategy for this place or hire Gene’O to write me one, but on the other hand, “write about whatever the hell I want whenever the hell I want” seems to be working okay so far. We’ll see.
And now, to spend the rest of the day staring at Word files and cursing at Microsoft. Fun!
(EDIT: Just noticed this– this is my 850th post.)
Ethiopia, ladies and gentlemen!
I swore I’d never complain about American drivers again after spending a month in Israel. This makes Israeli drivers look like pikers.
In which I release a dove
The floodwaters appear to have receded as of about 11:00 PM last night, still with no explanation. I had nearly a thousand hits yesterday (previous record was 708) with no discernible uptick in interaction with the site. As of right now, a much-more-typical 28 page views.
Weeeeeird.
Thus endeth this week’s blogwankery. I promise to not mention traffic again for a while.
Okay seriously WTF
The Inexplicable Traffic Surge of Inexplicableness continues apace. I set a record yesterday for unique viewers– over 300– and as of 6:30 AM already have 120 unique viewers today and 160 page views. I have never woken up to numbers like that, ever. And everything’s still coming from overseas, without referrers, and via what appears to be direct clickthroughs to random posts:
I really wish the countries box listed everything; there are probably at least another dozen or so with less than 4 hits, if the last seven days summary means anything. Of that list on the right, only “On thpoilerth” is from the last couple of days. And 88 other hits to posts not on that list.
I ain’t complaining, but man, I would love an explanation for this.
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