Does a Blog Post Sell Books?

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Does a Blog Post Sell Books?

Or: So I seem to be putting off writing the next book.

by Thea Atkinson

You know from my last post that I enjoy playing with numbers. I have a spreadsheet and graphs and formulas and everything. It wasn’t too long ago that I plugged in one single purchase for each of my books over the .com and .co.uk platforms of Amazons just to see what it would look like– and came up with an astonishing realization.

I could earn $1800 in a month.

Wow.

The thing with spreadsheets is you can have fun with them. You can plug in numbers, you can fudge numbers, and you can budget, plan, and what-if till your eyes bleed…the reality is always very different.

So After last week’s post I started thinking: has my blog helped or hindered me. By helped I mean: gain me an audience. By hinder I mean: keeping me from writing. (Any one who blogs knows the time, effort, and energy that goes into writing and finding readers for it. Phew. Talk about time consuming.)

Thank heaven I enjoy it.

So I started looking over my spreadsheet and I started comparing it to my blog traffic on certain days to see if there was a trend. John Locke certainly felt there was a connection. I read his book, and I tried out his technique to see if he was joshing me out of my $4.99. (it was an interesting read. You might consider looking him up. something about how I sold a million ebooks or somesuch.)

July 16, 2011

I wrote a post that I connected to an ebook of mine that didn’t sell (I wanted to track the effect) in a way I thought was authentic. Secret Language of Crows had sold a total of 4 books in the 30 days before this particular post, and it had sold an average of 4 books per month for the 3 months before.

The next two weeks, over the .com and .co.uk and Smashwords platforms, I sold 11 copies of that book. Huzzah. It looked like ole John had something. I started to believe in the power of blogging to reach an audience. Could finding a Thea reader really be as easy as this?

I decided to pick 5 days when my blog hits were high for whatever reason: more hits should mean more chance of selling, right?

Sept 25, 2011

202 hits.

Incidentally, the post I had put up one day before was this one about secrets: AND incidentally, on the 25th, an article came out from a book reviewer (Jodi Delong) who had reviewed the Secret Language of Crows for The Chronicle Herald. The review brought me 15 hits directly that I could attribute to the Chronicle Herald link, but I imagine it was actually more. Over the next 14 days, I sold 37 copies of Secret Language of Crows. (Thanks once again, Jodi!) The 14 days before that? TWO.

Who were the target audience for that post? Well, folks like me. Folks that read. Folks that care about characters. Folks who just like to get some insight on the human condition.

OK. So things were really, really looking awesome for the blogging thang.

May 26, 2012

192 hits

Near the end of lobster season in my region and the big thing on everyone’s mind this year was price, greed, and striking. My lil post got the second highest posts of my blogging history with What do you know about Lobster Fishing? The post itself wasn’t attributed to any of my ebooks in particular, it was just there because I felt I wanted to say something about the topic. Ah. So. Did I sell anything?

10 books that day. The day before? 5. The day after? 5. The average for the week before? 5. The average for the week after? 5.

Target audience? Regular ole folks like me.

Hmmm.

So let’s look at random.

March 10, 2012

I post Coming Clean: Small Publishing Stats from a modest Seller

Overall, this post has had 370 hits. I can’t tell how many on the day I posted it, as I can’t find it in WordPress, but I can tell you how many sales I had that day: 11

The day before? 16
The day after? 19

This post made it to the Ipad’s Zite magazine. Wow. That should have netted me some readers, one would think.

March 31, 2012

I post I love your book and other nasty emails.

This one gets a total of 209 hits overall.

Sales on that day: 12
The day before: 17
The day after: 11

Last One: August 6, 2011

I post Runaways and Fiction. Attached it to a book (Secret Language of Crows again)

This post gets 178 hits overall

Sales on that day: 8 (no SLOC sales for 5 more days and then 2 in one day)
The day before: 10
The day after: 9

Target Audience: Folks like me.

So what does all this mean? Really?

I wish I knew. But it does seem to me that I get the most interest when I write for the same audience as my books. It seems that a multi-layered blog post with some advertisement works best. It seems that blogging is far, far better for audience reach than simply doing nothing because no one out there knows who the heck Thea Atkinson is anyway. (‘cept me Mom. She’s the bees knees, truly. Love Ya Mom).

And it seems that I have far too much invested in procrastinating when I should be working on the next book in the Elemental Magic series (The first one is Water Witch in case you weren’t sure). I also learned that I should continue blogging for the reason I continue blogging: because I like it–not to increase sales.

Because really, I can’t think of a single book I’ve bought because of a blog post I’ve read. Can you?

BTW: do you think this post was for writers or readers? grin.

-30-

Don’t forget the Haystack giveaway. You can win a $50 Amazon Card.

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Thea is the author of several novels that she considers left of mainstream. You can find her on Smashwords, BN, Kobo, Sony, Apple