I had the same problem back when my blog (then at fuckyourselftohell.com & likewise titled) was popular: Literally thousands of people were visiting my blog every day, but very few people commented. Something like 30k-50k unique IPs visited my site every month, and fewer than a dozen people ever commented. It’s happening again: At least hundreds and up to thousands of people are listening to my various podiobooks, and only a tiny handful a) rate them, b) review them c) comment on them, and/or d) engage with me at all.

bleh.

Of course, actual book sales vs. size of readership shows a similar relationship. I’ve just ran the numbers on downloads of my free eBooks: I have something like 1000 downloads of each title in the year they’ve been up (except FWYCR, which has only been up a few months, but has been dl’d at a slightly faster rate in that time), and each book has been downloaded in each of the 7 formats available in roughly the same amounts. So: electronic versions of my 6 available novels combined have been dl’d a total of 5543 times, at least the first episodes of each of my 4 podcast novels have been downloaded 5481 times, and I’ve sold … (runs and pulls a report from my accounting software) … 86 books, including paid eBooks (ie: kindle & smashwords) and not including the two books @tdhurst asked for tonight, total. Well, since 1/2007, before which I don’t have good accounting, anyway. 11110 books have been tried, 86 of those were paid for. That’s a 0.774% conversion rate. Three-quarters of 1% of people who try my books consider them worth paying for. That’s actually close to the response rate I got on the FWYCR contest, so … I don’t know why I expected better.

Art Walk went good, though. Sold 2 paintings (and not mini-paintings; big ones) & 2 T-Shirts at Swine Flu prices! Hooray for global pandemics!

I had the same problem back when my blog (then at fuckyourselftohell.com & likewise titled) was popular: Literally thousands of people were visiting my blog every day, but very few people commented. Something like 30k-50k unique IPs visited my site every month, and fewer than a dozen people ever commented. It’s happening again: At least hundreds and up to thousands of people are listening to my various podiobooks, and only a tiny handful a) rate them, b) review them c) comment on them, and/or d) engage with me at all.

bleh.

Of course, actual book sales vs. size of readership shows a similar relationship. I’ve just ran the numbers on downloads of my free eBooks: I have something like 1000 downloads of each title in the year they’ve been up (except FWYCR, which has only been up a few months, but has been dl’d at a slightly faster rate in that time), and each book has been downloaded in each of the 7 formats available in roughly the same amounts. So: electronic versions of my 6 available novels combined have been dl’d a total of 5543 times, at least the first episodes of each of my 4 podcast novels have been downloaded 5481 times, and I’ve sold … (runs and pulls a report from my accounting software) … 86 books, including paid eBooks (ie: kindle & smashwords) and not including the two books @tdhurst asked for tonight, total. Well, since 1/2007, before which I don’t have good accounting, anyway. 11110 books have been tried, 86 of those were paid for. That’s a 0.774% conversion rate. Three-quarters of 1% of people who try my books consider them worth paying for. That’s actually close to the response rate I got on the FWYCR contest, so … I don’t know why I expected better.

Art Walk went good, though. Sold 2 paintings (and not mini-paintings; big ones) & 2 T-Shirts at Swine Flu prices! Hooray for global pandemics!