It’s the day after the last day of Chicon 7, and I have caught up a little on sleep. I had one of the best times I’ve ever had at a convention, and the book launch party went (IMO) swimmingly. Lots of people showed up, people really loved the jewelry and the stickers, and everyone seems to think the book design almost as cool as I do.
Some people who helped make it the most awesome of cons were: Al Bogdan, who’s provided some lovely party pics; the enigmatic Folly Blaine/Christy Johnson, who is always good con company; Randy Henderson, who pitched in when needed and also kept everyone from taking things too seriously; Stina Leicht, whose book And Blue Skies From Pain was also being promoted at the party and who was an excellent co-host as well as providing a vicarious experience of being on the ballot 😉 ; Vicki Saunders, who trekked and fiddled and above all, kept me from stressing (too much); Dallas Taylor, bartender extraordinaire and always, always, always Tod McCoy for being one of the prime instigators of all this madness.
Various highlights:
Watching the Hugo Awards from the bar with Folly Blaine, Gio Clairval, and Tod McCoy and supplying what John Scalzi was saying since we didn’t have any sound.
Lovely lunch with Kay Kenyon and all too brief Louise Marley time.
Several people thanking me for personalized rejections from Fantasy, and one young man saying that rejection was one of the reasons why he was still writing.
As always, meeting many people I knew from correspondence or social networking and getting a chance to put faces and voices to the icons and screen names. Two I was particularly excited to meet were Gio Clairval and Jay Caselberg.
Getting to squee like a fangirl upon meeting Sharon Shinn.
A stint at the SFWA table and getting to stroke Catherine Lundoff’s lovely book cover for Silver Moon, which is a kickass novel about menopausal women turning into werewolves, which I’m downloading onto my Kindle asap.
The Broud Universe Rapidfire Reading, which was jampacked with great stuff, including a closing filk song, which was about the nicest way to end a reading that I’ve seen or heard in a long time.
Getting to see Rachel Swirsky in full and beautiful glitter.
A lot more which is still full of happy, giddy blur, so if I’m overlooking you, it is because my memory is still aswirl. 😉
Your party was a highlight of my con! Got to get your books. Won a necklace-which made my little girl very happy when she saw it. Met some of my favorite writers as they came through. You, Vicky, Stina and Dallas were such great people to meet – and Dallas was about the best mixologist ever. Thanks for a great time!
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Adventures in E-publishing: The Rationale Behind It
One of the things I’ve decided to do over the next six months is release a number of my stories in small mini-collections in electronic form. Each of these will consist of 2-3 already published stories, with 1-2 ones original to the collection. The first is Halloween Quartet, which contains “Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know” (appeared originally in Clarkesworld), “Niobe in the Rain” (appeared originally in Serpentarius), “So Glad We Had This Time Together” (appeared originally in Apex Digest), and “Pumpkin Knight,” which is original to the collection.
The next one will be Desert Quartet, which will contain “Aquila’s Ring,” (originally appeared in Light and Shadow II), “Karaluvian Fale” (appeared originally in Giganotasaurus), “Her Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight” (the title story from my second collection), and “Mirabai the Twice-Lived,” which is original to that collection. It’ll also contain an essay about the world in which all of those stories are set, that of Armageddon MUD, and my experience working with it.
Other e-projects in the works: a mini-collection of flash, a mini-collection of superhero stories, and something collecting blog musings about fiction.
Why do this? Because I do think electronic publishing is clearly the way the industry is going. I’m curious about the power to sell one’s work that it promises the author and I’d like to get in on what seems to be at least the first or second, if not ground, floor of the movement.
I’m lucky in that I have a little bit of a name, acquired through publishing short stories. I don’t know that this would work for someone with no already established platform. And I don’t expect to make a vast sum of money from them. But I do expect there to be a slow trickle. At least – that’s my hope.
How will I spread the word of them? I’ve learned a little from publicizing Near + Far, but I’m not sure how relentless I want to be about pushing these. I’ll certainly talk about the experience of putting them together on here, and will be mentioning them on social networks as well as on my mailing list. Suggestions are welcome, as always 😉
If you want to sign up for that mailing list, by the way, which will come no more than once a month and mention new publications and classes, fill it out here:
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Social Media: Pinterest Analytics and Links for 3/18/2013
August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!
Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.
I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.
Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:
Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.
Day one: 1 pin from 1 pinner
Day two: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day three: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day four: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day five: 5 pins, 3 pinners
Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.
Day one: 0 repins, 0 repinners
Day two: 10 repins, 10 repinners
Day three: 2 repins, 2 repinners
Day four: 2 repins, 1 repinner
Day five: 3 repins, 3 repinners
Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.
Day one: 247 people saw 474 total images
Day two: 324 people saw 1063 total images
Day three: 242 people saw 1347 total images
Day four: 159 people saw 247 total images
Day five: 856 people saw 2957 total images.
Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.
Day one: Three images were clicked on, each time by a different person. As a note of interest, Google Analytics claims only one visitor from Pinterest that day.
Day two: Eight images, eight different visitors. (Google Analytics reports 6.)
Day three: Twelve images, one visitor. (Google Analytics reports 4.)
Day four: Two images, two visitors. (Google Analytics reports 2.)
Day five: Three clicks, three visitors. (Google Analytics reports 3 as well.)
Factors that might have affected those numbers:
Day three: I re-organized my boards so one with a lot of links pointing back to my site was in the top row. I submitted that board as a StumbleUpon bookmark. And I made one of my boards, fabulous female protagonists, a group board and invited some other people to pin to it.
Day four: I was completely absent from Pinterest activity.
Day five: I pinned a new piece from my site onto a personal board that collects similar pieces from my site.
The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.
And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.
So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.
Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.
Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?
Recent Social Media Links of Interest:
WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.
2 Responses
Your party was a highlight of my con! Got to get your books. Won a necklace-which made my little girl very happy when she saw it. Met some of my favorite writers as they came through. You, Vicky, Stina and Dallas were such great people to meet – and Dallas was about the best mixologist ever. Thanks for a great time!
Thank you for coming to the party! It was such a great time, and Im glad your daughter likes the necklace. 🙂