Jami Attenberg saw a flash of internet fame, but it didn’t help her sell her book. It made her no money at all. She reports on the experience of “sliding back to earth” down the long tail of a Google Analytics report.
…it felt bittersweet. I had dashed off the blog post, been careless with my writing. Even if the passion showed through, it was certainly not my best work. I had spent years and years working on my novels, agonizing over sentences, characters, themes, and my big message to the world. But in one day more people had read this simple post than all of my books combined — times five.
If you want to sell anything, everything around everything you do online must be optimized to the pixel for that purpose. Even then, when lightning strikes, only a few loose and hungry electrons will fall into the right place. If what you do never leaves the internet, you have to get hit over, and over, and over again.
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