There are a great many mysteries in the world of promoting your work as a writer. I just wanted to share some insights around traffic and sales to my Gumroad, following coverage of my work in Newsweek.
Here’s a graph for Gumroad for my last thirty days:
You can see at right a spike in traffic (grey bars) for May 15th, when the article dropped. Page views for the store peaked at 424 visits the day after, as it did sales. During the period following the piece, I sold a total of 22 books, which I am confident attributing to the Newsweek piece, and its ripple effects.
That is not a huge batch of sales, but I’m pretty happy about it regardless. You can see though, how I still get somewhat consistent low sales prior to that. In the weeks prior to that during the past 30 days, I still made 13 sales, and one batch of those was someone buying a bunch of books at once.
Now, it’s possible if my original article in Newsweek was different – either different contents, or a different author covering my story, that those figures would be different. It’s difficult to say.
In any event, I just wanted to transparently share this sales data for other authors wondering just how much of a windfall this kind of coverage really is. The short answer is, not huge in terms of sales, but quite big personally for the doors it opens for me to get further media coverage.
Tim B.
Should also add I was invited onto 1 podcast as a result of this coverage, which is a secondary & very positive outcome apart from sales.