The power of the external event

[Andre Jute]

My novel Iditarod is not presented stricly as a tie-in to the true annual race which inspired it. It is, indeed, about a version of the event which newcomers are not quite at ease with, which accounts for a recent 2 star review from some person who pronounces herself an expert, already adequately excoriated by the other reviewers. Fortunate then that most of the fans and readers and potential readers are long-time followers of the race, deeply knowledgeable, and prefer the book just as it stands, as a record of a time that they now regard with nostalgia.

My blog and the CoolMain Press netsite attract about a thousand visitors each every week. That's the result of fifteen months of hard work by some pretty talented people. Out of season the Facebook page where readers are invited to follow the race with me http://www.facebook.com/pages/Iditaro... attracts a few handsful of people most weeks, and a steady handful "talking about this".

But here's the interesting thing. I regret to say I didn't keep a record of how many thousands per week visited the page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Iditaro... at the height of the Iditarod race, but it was over 3000 on just one day, about one quarter to one fifth of all the selected hardcore fans signed into the Iditarod Trail Committee's page, the only place where it was promoted to specific fans (elsewhere it was promoted only to existing readers of the book). That is already pretty impressive. At one stage I noted 1200-odd "talking about this".

After the winner, second and third came in, a couple of weeks ago, for lack of time I no longer updated the Facebook page for the book. But the stragglers and back markers also have their fans, and they too are hardcore fans, likely much harder than the fickle crowd who travel with me, who were attracted to the race by my book rather then the other way round. (The "other way round" folk are hardcore knowledgeable and many of them know the mushers as neighbours and friends. Quite a few of them have competed in the race.)

So how fast do you think the appeal of a page dedicated to the book falls when it no longer gets the traffic from my crowd of star-lovers? Very fast would you say? I would have agreed with you until tonight, when I noticed that more than a week after I stopped refreshing the page, it still has 759 "weekly total reach" (presumably identifiable individuals visiting once or more often) with 35 still "talking about this" and 13 "new likes".

I'm flattered of course, because these people, fans of the back markers, aren't new fans; they're not looking to my page for the basic explanations that make up the core of my service there, they're there for the little extras, the moments when I forget that I'm servicing the rawest of the newbies.

Nor are they necessarily there out of loyalty to a writer who wrote a book, no matter how good, about "our race". A surprising statistic extracted by a grad student, admittedly on assumptions that would drive formal statisticians crazy (but approved by me — I have considerable experience of this sort of opinion-based research), is that more than 60% of the users of the ITC netpage do not connect IDITAROD a novel of The Greatest Race on Earth with the book, that is, they just take it as an elaborate screen name, and the avatar of the book that accompanies it as a generic. I don't do much to correct miscomprehension this because it is my holiday and I'm in no hurry to sell those people a book: sooner or later they will buy the Iditarod book from me, and then curiosity will lead them to buying something else — if I don't lose them first by being pushy.

But, regardless of the reason, compare 1000-odd visitors to the blog and the same to a micropublisher's page with 760 visitors to a single highly specialised page in the tail end of an event, and you will see why I called this post "The power of the external event."

[K.A.]

How interesting!