Same Tune, Better Tools

It’s a great time for internet analytics. What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars a year is now free, thanks to a new-ish service called Quantcast.

Some visitors may remember my Alexa-based comparisons of what I call “Popular Metafiction” and traditional science fiction outlets. Well, Quantcast makes Alexa look about as sleek and modern as a Ford Model T. Quantcast is a professional competitive analytics and online ad-planning platform—for anyone to use, for free. The data is also (typically) more accurate than Alexa and Compete.com, since Quantcast makes an effort for sites to quantify their traffic. Does it mean it is perfect? No, especially for smaller sites. But it is a very good tool.

Yeah, I know, I know: so what the heck does this have to do with science fiction?

Quite a bit, actually—provided you are interested in discovering what the real differences are between sites that get 2-3 million visitors a month and sites that get 5-50 thousand visitors per month—and then using that intelligence to market your work.

Let’s take a look at a few examples. I’m providing the screen caps here to freeze this instant in time, but it’s much more interesting to click through the live links (below the gallery)

BoingBoing

io9

SciFi Channel

Strange Horizons

Futurismic

F&SF

Asimovs

Analog

“But wait!” some authors will cry. “Tor.com just launched its shiny new socialated website and Baen has been offering free stuff and forums and other argly-bargly internetish bits since, like, the earth cooled!”

That’s cool. Here you go:

Tor

Baen

Neither is exactly setting the world on fire—though, to be fair, it’s impossible to say what the Tor traffic will look like in a few months. If they do their job well, it should grow significantly.

But it’s the demographics, “audience also visits” and “audience also searches for” results that are most telling. And again, we get a very clean separation between the popular metascience sites, the entertainment sites, and the more traditional science fiction sites. Which means that the traditional sites are simply not reaching the audience that might be most interested in its content.

And that’s what we should be focusing on: how to effectively reach new audiences. What keywords are they using? What other sites are they visiting? What else are they interested in? Because even if they’re only interested in Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who right now, who knows what they might get into next?

“Okay, okay,” long-time readers of this blog will say. “I get it. So what do we do?”

And that’s a great question. In the next three posts, I’ll put on my marketing hat and take a look at how I’d use this data, and the complete suite of modern marketing tools, to help:

1. An author with a book to promote.

2. A small publisher looking to expand their reach.

3. A big publisher looking towards the future.

Now, remember: this will be coming from the point of view of a marketing professional. This is my day job. Companies like Memorex, Princess Cruises, Warner Brothers, Epson, and Cotton, Inc. pay me and the company I founded to do this. I have some credibility in this space.

But if you think marketing is beneath you, and that the best authors and the best publishers always rise to the surface and win automatically, that’s fine. You can skip the next few posts.

But remember—your competition may be taking notes.

August 23rd, 2008 / 2 Comments »