I’ve had a policy that I wouldn’t give Amazon reviews except to a couple of favorite authors. Early on I gave reviews to a couple of books because friends asked. Then I wondered what would happen if a friend asked for a review on a book I didn’t love.I didn’t want to have to tell friends I wouldn’t review them. So I made a “no review” policy.

But I was at lunch with some writers a few weeks ago and one mentioned that Amazon reviews really help sales. So that made me wonder if I shouldn’t be doing reviews. If I want to recommend a book, many more people will read my review on Amazon than will read it here on my blog.

What makes me hesitate to give Amazon reviews is the star deal. I used to give stars here on my reviews and I ditched them because I didn’t like grading books. I like to recommend books, and I like to discuss things I liked and didn’t like in books. But I don’t like giving stars. What if I have a friend who wrote a two-star book in my opinion? What do I do about that? If I don’t have to give stars I can just say what I liked and didn’t like. But the stars….

What do you all do? If you give Amazon reviews are you swayed to give higher stars to people you know and like even if their books aren’t that good?

I also think Goodreads is pretty important. I’m not doing anything there, but I think I ought to. Are any of you on Goodreads? Is it easy to use?

Working on revisions all day. It just amazes me. I open a file my agent sends me, scan her comments, and immediately start dinking. I forget everything else. Revision is my favorite thing in the world, I think.

But it’s getting late and I need to throw a post up. So here’s a real quickie:

My Linking Experiment Part 2

I reported three weeks ago that after twenty days of linking, I had moved my blog ranking on Alexa from 1,475,047 to 778,133 globally, and from 171,420 to 68,549 in the US.  Starting out, I had 39 links coming in. That number went to 77. At that point I quit linking and here are the new figures:

• Start—August 31:

• Global 778,133
• US   68,549
• Links coming back to me   77
• Google PageRank   3

• End—September 20:

• Global   512,931
• US   56,275
• Links coming back to me   77
• Google PageRank   3

Clearly, once I stopped linking, my Alexa Traffic Rating gain slowed considerably. This started the very first day. Within three days, my US ranking had lost ground for the first time since I started the experiment.

The next phase is to link on a separate page—the blog roll page up in my menu—but this time I’m going to link to each blog once a week. Instead of linking to fifty posts a week I’m going to aim at fifty posts a month.

I’m linking to all the blogs I like, that have anything to do with young adult lit, regardless of their PageRank. About half have a higher PageRank and half have a lower PageRank than mine. None have a better Alexa traffic rating.

First Athol Dickson posted on Novel Rocket giving his opinion on how tough it is to market his novels to Christian readers. After that Mike Duran asked if Christian readers are dumbed down.

Mike clarified that he doesn’t think Christians are dumber than general market readers, but he thinks “readers who are accustomed to looking for a particular message in their stories are less likely to be good readers.”

Is it that Christian book readers aren’t good readers?

When I disagree with the message I don’t like the book

I don’t think I’m looking in novels for a “clear moral, message, or doctrinal statement,” as Mike and Athol suggest Christian readers are doing. The problem I have with some novels is not in the lack of a clear moral message, but in the grinding of the author’s theology against my own.

Preach no message if you like. But if you start preaching, be aware that you’re going to offend the readers who don’t agree with you. Why should we expect anything else?

Athol thinks he’s offending Christian readers by giving no answers, and he may be right. Sometimes the refusal to give answers, though, gives a message that there are no answers, and that, obviously, is going to bug those of us who think there are plenty of answers and man’s problem is not that he doesn’t know the answers, but that he doesn’t want to obey what he knows.

But if Athol is offending readers by withholding answers, he’s OK with that. He’s writing the books he wants to write and he’s not worried about having big sales.

This is as it should be.

Except….

Maybe we just need to find the right fish tank to swim in

I think if Athol is not meeting with wild commercial success that doesn’t necessarily mean Christian readers are poor readers and I’m certain it doesn’t mean he’s a poor writer (I’ve only read one of his books, but that was enough to show me that he’s an excellent writer). Maybe it means he’s aiming at the wrong audience. If he really is writing books with no answers then maybe he should be aiming at the Blue Like Jazz audience. Isn’t that audience more comfortable with questions than answers? They revere art, too, I think.

I’m not saying I think Athol’s view of God is lacking in any way. I haven’t read enough of his stuff to form an opinion on that (and I’ve never read anything by Donald Miller—so I’m not remarking on his spirituality, either). I’m simply saying that Athol may be better suited for the “I’m on a journey and don’t have many answers, but I know social issues are important” crowd, rather than for the “typical CBA fiction reader” crowd. Would that be the Blue Like Jazz crowd? I don’t know. I’m just saying…there must be an audience that will appreciate his stuff.

We’re just people, after all

In the end, I don’t know about Christian readers as a group, but I tend to think that Christian readers are no different from feminist readers or eco-friendly readers or pro-homosexual marriage readers or any other group of readers. Some are good readers and have thought carefully about the issues and others want their ears tickled and don’t want to have to think through issues at all.

Besides, radical feminist readers are disappointed when they are expecting a radical feminist read and they get something less, as are homosexual readers and every other kind of reader. Expectations matter. But that’s a post for another day.

Several months ago I read on Kristen Lamb’s blog that authors needed get rid of the cutesy blog names and just have their own names on their blog headers. And, yeah, I can see her point. It’s all about branding.

Becoming a Household Name

The thing that struck me recently, though, is that when my blog is named Sally Apokedak, then any time someone searches for Sally Apokedak they find me right away. But when they search for YA books, they don’t find me.

How many people are searching for Sally Apokedak? Only people who already know how to spell my name and they will find me no matter what my blog is called.

It’s one thing to want your name to be a brand name, but wanting a thing isn’t enough. You have to do something that is noteworthy before people begin to remember who you are. And once you do something noteworthy, does it matter if they know your name? Many people know Randy Ingermanson’s name. But many just call him the snowflake guy. Why would Randy care if they know his name or not, as long as they are finding his site and buying his “how to write” products?

On the other hand, I remembered Kristen Lamb’s name because she makes sure we know that name. What made me find her in the first place, was not that I searched for her name. I found her because someone linked to a post she did on marketing. I was never looking for Kristen Lamb and if her blog was called Warrior Writers, it wouldn’t make any difference to me. She wants me to remember her name so if I see a book of hers in the bookstore—written by Kristen Lamb, not Warrior Writer—I’ll recognize her name on the cover. Of course, if you’re known as the snowflake guy or the Warrior Writer woman, you might have your publisher put that on the cover of the book. So does it really matter if your blog readers know your name?

Selling Yourself or Serving Your Reader?

Obviously we want to do both of these things. If we serve our readers, we will be selling ourselves, but I think the first goal is to get people to the blog, and the second goal is to hook them on the blog content. I don’t think the blog is about selling books. It’s about selling the blog. If we look at our blogs from the standpoint of the blog visitor it seems clear that titling the blog so the visitor can easily tell what the blog is about would serve him better than telling him your name (unless you’re already a household name, of course).

So if any of you have noticed that the name of my blog changes all the time, this is why. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I’m trying to figure out who my audience is and what kind of name and content will help them find me and stay with me.

Key Words in Titles Will Help Some People Find You

Last month I used YA Fantasy with a Fairy Tale Flavor and when people searched for YA fantasy fairy tales my site was coming up on the first page. But is my blog about YA fantasy with a fairy tale flavor? Those are the novels I’m writing, but my blog isn’t really focused on those. This month I’m trying Young Adult Books. The competition is too tough for those key words. There are huge sites that come up when you search for young adult books. So next month I will tweak my title again.

How the search engines work is somewhat mysterious. They keep it that way to try to keep people from cheating, but I suspect they give some credit for anchor text still, even though some say this no longer matters. If so, what we title our blogs matters a lot, because many bloggers link to us using our blog titles as anchor text. If someone links to Sally Apokedak at Sally Apokedak that’s going to tell search engines and readers that http://www.sally-apokedak.com/whispers_of_dawn is about Sally Apokedak—which means nothing to people who don’t know me. If someone links to Sally Apokedak at YA Fantasy Novels for Girls  that will tell the search engines and readers that http://www.sally-apokedak.com/whispers_of_dawn is about YA fantasy novels for girls.

Experimenting a Little Probably Won’t Kill You

As long as the URL stays the same, you don’t lose traffic or links or readers when you change your blog name (though you might confuse your readers some by switching names). What you don’t want to do is change the URL, if you can help it.

Thoughts? Do you have people surfing in from search engine terms and staying? Have you ever found a blog via a search and subscribed to it?

Last month I linked to a whole lot of posts.

I was going fast. My links were not quality links. I didn’t put in any description of what I was linking to. I didn’t put keywords in the links. Sometimes, I didn’t even use the whole title of the article I was linking to. My goal was to read fast, comment fast, and link fast, so I could see what effect this had on the blogs I was linking to and what effect it had on my own blog.

I kept track of my Alexa traffic numbers. I also kept track of six blogs I was linking to and five blogs I wasn’t linking to, for comparison.

I recorded the numbers every day.

Halfway through the experiment, I read a number of blog posts that said Alexa traffic numbers are worthless.

I’m not sure how true that is. I’ve read other posts that say Alexa ranking is important if you want to monetize your blog.  Besides, I didn’t have any other way to guage what I was doing. Google doesn’t update their PageRank publicly but once every several months.

I also read several posts that told me linking to too many sites would hurt my ranking with search engines.

I’m not sure how true that is, either. I think when you link a lot, your links are worth less. When I link to one blog a week, that blogger will get credit for having my little blog giving 100% of my “vote of confidence” to his blog. But I linked to 200 posts last month. So each post only got .5% of my vote confidence. The search engines, it seems, take my limited link juice and split it between all my links.

Linking a lot is sort of like being the party girl in high school, I guess. No one really respects her. If I link too much, the search engines will look at me and say, “She’s just loose. She’ll link-up with anyone. We can’t trust that the blogs she’s linking to are any good.”

So, I’m not helping others too much by linking to lots of sites. But am I hurting myself?

Whether the search engines will be offended by promiscuous linking, remains to be seen. My guess is that linking too broadly will earn you a bad reputation. On the other hand, search engines will view you as a content-rich and helpful site if you link well. Many years ago I wrote at Suite 101 and I went through training at About.com, and I know that search engines like to see sites that are linking to other relevant sites that have great content. That’s just common sense. They want to give searchers the best sites, because when they return good search results people continue to use them. If your site is full of good content and great links of interest to your readers, the search engines are going to see you as a good search return.

From what I can see so far, the linking has helped me.

Here are my starting and ending figures. I won’t give you the stats of the other blogs, but all the blogs I linked to gained ground. The sites that had lower PageRanks than I had gained the most, some of them as much as 4 million places. The sites that were already more powerful than I was, gained from 300,000 to a million places. On average, the sites I linked to moved up 1,598,416 spots globally and 238,862 spots in the US (none lost ground), while sites I didn’t link to moved up an average of 420,589 spots globally and 29,205 in the US (some lost ground).

And here are my Alexa stats:

• Start—August 11:

• Global   1,475,047
• US   171,420
• Links coming back to me   39
• Google PageRank   3

• End—August 31:

• Global   778,133
• US   68,549
• Links coming back to me   77
• Google PageRank   3

On September 1st, for the next phase of my experiment, I stopped linking. We’ll see what happens.