Paged Media

Because authors deserve professional websites.

February 19, 2008

It’s 10pm. Do you know where your readers are?

Are most of your readers in the US, or elsewhere? Do you have a concentration of readers in Spokane, where your book was featured at a book discussion six months ago? Where should your publisher send you on your next tour?

How can you find out?

1. Analyze your web visitors.

Using free services like Google Analytics or Clicky, you can find out where¹ your readers are.

Clicky is great for short-term (i.e. today, yesterday) views of your web traffic, but for long-term data gathering, you can’t beat Google Analytics. To get started, sign up for an account — you can use any existing Google account (Gmail, Blogger) or create one using your existing email address. The Analytics site will walk you through the setup process; at one point you’ll need to paste some HTML into your website’s files or templates. About 24 hours after you add the tracking code to your pages, you should start seeing data in the reports — not just little dots on the map, but also what search terms people used to find your site, what browser they’re using, and other invaluable (but anonymous) information.

You can even let other people see your reports, if you like. Your publicist might be interested.

2. Ask your readers to pin their locations on a map.

You can set up a Frappr map for your readers to tell you where they live (and perhaps a few other personal details). Your Frappr map will be more accurate than Google Analytics, but will contain fewer people, since not everyone will take the time to sign in.

3. Let fans tell you where they’d like you to appear.

By signing up for an account on Eventful, readers can place demands for your presence. While this site is more popular with musicians than authors, there is a literary category. To get started, you’ll need to create an account and a performer profile (fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss has a good one). Then let your readers know you’re listening to their requests. If you have a page listing your upcoming events, add a note at the bottom:

Don’t see your location here? Sign up at eventful.com and let me know where you’d like me to be.

Link that to your performer profile, and wait for the requests to come in.

No matter which method(s) you use, it’ll take some time to accumulate useful data. Why not start now?

¹ To be accurate, we should mention that what you’re really finding out is where your visitor’s IP address has been assigned, and this might not correspond to their actual location in some cases. However, it’s close enough for government work. (Seriously.)

Posted in How To at 9:32 pm