Let’s talk about hype.
The A Distant Soil comic went online late January 2009. The current traffic is over ten times higher than our traffic in January of last year. We have approximately 9 times more repeat viewers per day.
That is fact, not hype.
Income has increased, largely due to incentives and donations, which I appreciate very much. It’s early days to see a significant increase in sales. I get royalties on the book. Considering I haven’t had a new book out in awhile, that’s a good sign. I realize my expectation of a sales jump on a webcomic anywhere in the first year was unrealistic. The only webcomics I know of which have done well with sales of physical books have been online for three years or more.
There’s an increase in foreign traffic, but it’s doubtful we’re selling a lot of books in Slovenia. That does not diminish my deep appreciation of Slovenia.
I’ve enjoyed learning how to read stat information, especially how to read independent site meters. Many of them are wildly inaccurate, but my linked stat counter sometimes agrees with the info at 7Zoom.com. It’s in the ballpark of a bad day of page views for me.
I’ve compared my traffic to that of other sites, and some people are Liar! liar! Pants on Fire! If their traffic is that low, one wonders where their “millions of fans” are.
They never had ‘em in the first place. Duh.
Anyone can see your book sales, with a little digging. If you run around telling whoppers about how your small press book “sold better than the X-Men”, some gullible blogger may believe you, but the rest of us will wonder where the hell you got those numbers. Especially when we can see that your last graphic novel sold 2,000 copies.
If I had millions of fans one day, and my last book sales dropped to 2,000 copies, I would not be making a public issue of it. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
