Hitting a Targeted Audience

I was lucky enough a week ago or so to get an enthusiastic review from Bill Barnes, the gentleman who draws the Unshelved webcomic. I had a great response from the review as seen below:

The spike in hits and page views is . . . well obvious . . . to say the least. The magnitude of the spike is even more impressive when you look at month view:

One interesting difference (at least to me) between getting mentioned on BoingBoing (which is also totally awesome) and getting mentioned on Unshelved, is that people coming from Unshelved spent a lot more time looking around.

The people from BoingBoing looked at the linked page, and went on to something else or straight back to BoingBoing. The Unshelved people went to all sorts of pages and looked at all sorts of things. I wasn't surprised by this. The people who read Unshelved tend to be librarians, and they were sent to my site with a huge thumb's up, so I'm sure they wanted to check around and see what was there. And a nice chunk of them bought copies of the issue (yay!) or subscriptions (WOO HOO!), so that was totally awesome.

The people who tend to read BoingBoing are . . . well . . . everyone. Or at least a wider cross section of people than those who read Unshelved. Certainly the readers of Unshelved are more devoting to the pursuit of reading while the readers of BoingBoing could be interested in technology or ephemera or copyright or lots of things. When I was mentioned last year on BoingBoing it was for very specific things. They served different purposes in coming to the site than those who came from Unshelved. In both cases, I had great response and I really appreciated it.

I wish I could plan an Unshelved-like surge every month, but the fact that you can't plan it is part of why it worked: it was genuine and uncontrived. To find a place that has the reach and influence that Unshelved has every month would be a monumental task. But you could do it. The trick is finding people with a reading audience, and Unshelved is a great combination of creators who like books (and more specifically science fiction) and an audience that LOVES reading. In that vein, a lot of webcomics might not work.

Do the people that read Penny Arcade or Ctrl-Alt-Del read books/magazines, or do they primarily play video games? I don't know. It might be both, but I suspect they lean towards gaming and a print zine wouldn't necessarily appeal to them. People who read Seth's Blog or 43folders are probably readers, but would Seth Godin or Merlin Mann like Electric Velocipede? There's been little mention of science fiction on their sites. What about io9? Well, their focus is on media stuff . . .

The big hurdle, as I've pointed out above, is getting the person to be enthusiastic about your product. And that's a crapshoot. It could happen, it could not happen. You try for the widest coverage you can, and then you cross your fingers and hope you've researched well enough. Obviously when Bill Barnes gets printed material in the mail, he knows (even if it's not explicitly stated) that the person sending it is hoping for a mention or a review or--god's be praised--a comic.

On the rare occasions that I get stuff in the mail (and it could happen more, hint hint) I know that the person is hoping that I'll make mention of it. My stats would not impress anyone, but I can think of at least one example where I was enthusiastic about something and it lead to a purchase. Sometimes your aim is good, and sometimes it's not.