Apparently Saturday Has Decided It Likes Me
Saturday has spent most of this experiment behaving as if the internet closes for the weekend. Yesterday, it finally decided to clock in.
Saturday and I have had a difficult relationship.
Since I started this experiment, Saturday has consistently been one of the quietest days. Website quiet. Social media quiet. Everyone apparently outside touching grass while I sit here staring at analytics and drinking Coke Zero.
Fair enough.
Except yesterday, Saturday decided to give me some love.
And this is where I need to remind myself what I am actually doing.
I am still mostly crossposting. I am not creating dedicated Instagram posts and Reels. I am not building completely separate content for every social platform. I have not been recording the podcast constantly. And The Chosen only started a few days ago.
The advertising budget also remains exactly where it started: €0.
That difference matters to me.
More views are nice. More individual people arriving is better.
Six visits came directly from search engines yesterday. Six is obviously not a number that requires champagne, fireworks and a Netflix documentary. But six strangers searching for something and finding my website is completely different from six people who already follow me clicking something I posted.
They discovered me.
The United States also became the biggest source of website traffic for the day with 30 views, followed by Slovakia with 25, Italy with 16, Sweden with 14, the Netherlands with 11 and the United Kingdom with 7.
Canada, Hungary, Nigeria, Austria, Croatia and others also appeared.
My website is travelling more than I am.
The numbers right now
Instagram still refuses to follow the internet’s instructions
Instagram reached 8,522 views, 2,660 viewers, 723 interactions and 16 net followers over the last 30 days.
My favourite number is still 51%.
More than half of those views came from people who do not follow me.
Posts generated around 1.4K views. Stories generated 451.
Reels generated 4.
Four.
The internet keeps telling authors we must make Reels or we shall perish. Instagram apparently placed mine in witness protection.
The audience is moving beyond the audience I already had
LinkedIn reached 1,150 impressions in seven days and 588 members.
But the number that matters is this: 84% of those impressions came from outside my network.
I don’t need the same hundred people to see me one hundred times.
I need person 101.
Then 102.
Then 103.
Discovery.
Facebook recorded 415 views during the last seven days, with 70 engagements and three net followers.
Engagement was fourteen times higher than the previous comparison period.
Am I writing: FACEBOOK EXPLODED BY 243%!!!
Calm down.
It is 415 views.
😂
But Facebook has definitely decided to wake up.
Google is starting to understand what lives here
Google Search Console sent me another little spreadsheet to obsess over.
The interesting part is what Google is choosing to show.
Right now my book reviews are doing a lot of the search-engine heavy lifting. The review of The Cozy Nook Bookshop generated 24 impressions by itself and was sitting at an average search position of around 6.
Searches for Lupe Farkas showed me at position 1.
Google is also already showing pages for Ramen, Existential Crises, Dangerous Haven, A New Witch in the Northwoods, The Girl Before Me, Sassy & Sowed and the podcast.
That is useful information.
Google currently understands the review side of the ecosystem faster than it understands my own fiction.
So now my job is to keep building bridges from those search entrances toward Before October Ends, The Chosen, the podcast and everything else.
For fellow analytics nerds: what Google is already seeing
- Lupe Farkas — average position 1
- The Cozy Nook Bookshop spice level — average position 3.8
- The Cozy Nook Bookshop — average position 5.33
- Ramen, Existential Crises — already appearing in search
- Girl Before Me — already appearing in search
- Review snippets — 29 impressions in this 24-hour report
And then somebody offered to help.
This experiment has produced scams, strange offers, marketing messages, people trying to sell me things and enough emails to build a small museum.
Then Micheal Adewale, founder of SpencerWebTech, found Before October Ends and the Indie Author Experiment.
He told me he had some observations.
I gave him the rule immediately: I am not spending money during this experiment.
He said that was fine.
And then something shocking happened.
😂
He actually looked at what I had built and sent thoughtful suggestions about the relationship between the Journal, social media, Goodreads, the podcast, my books and the journey of somebody discovering me for the first time.
No surprise invoice.
No mysterious package.
No sudden transformation into: “For only $897 I can unlock your author’s quantum visibility vortex.”
Just help.
Micheal, thank you for your kindness.
I genuinely hope this creates another chain of kindness.
Somebody helps me. I credit them. A Rebel discovers their work. That Rebel helps somebody else. And around we go.
I also think there is something important about working with kind, selfless people.
When someone believes in what they do strongly enough to help before there is even a transaction, I pay attention.
So Rebels, if you need help with web design, SEO or digital marketing, go and look at Micheal’s work.
His contacts are waiting at the bottom of this post.
Now we are going to see whether Amazon God likes me.
Micheal pointed out something simple about Before October Ends.
A completely new reader arriving on the Amazon book page has to understand very quickly:
What is this book? Why might I care? And is this for me?
That is where Amazon A+ Content comes in.
I have wanted to build those visual sections on the Amazon page for ages.
I knew they existed.
I knew I wanted them.
I also had absolutely no idea what I was doing with them.
So Micheal and I are going to look at that part of the reader journey properly.
- Amazon A+ Content structure
- First-time reader clarity
- The diary countdown concept
- The psychological tension
- The atmosphere of the novel
- The central reader promise
- Book One and what comes next
- The path from discovery to reader
This is not about filling the Amazon page with louder promotional text.
It is about making the page clearer.
We are going to watch whether people move from the website toward Before October Ends on Amazon and whether improving the Amazon page changes anything.
Google God has spreadsheets.
Now we need to see what Amazon God does.
Excellent.
This is the part that matters
None of these numbers individually are enormous.
That is exactly why I keep publishing them.
I don’t want this experiment to become one of those internet diaries where somebody gets 400 views and writes as though Netflix just bought the film rights.
What interests me is that several things are beginning to move at the same time.
The Chosen has barely started.
Dedicated social-media posts and Reels have barely started.
The Amazon work has not even started yet.
I am still building the foundation.
At the beginning, almost everything depended on me pushing something somewhere.
Post the link. Share the review. Publish the Journal. Tell people the podcast exists. Tell people the book exists. Tell people The Chosen exists.
Now I am beginning to see tiny signs of the opposite happening.
Search engines are sending people.
Platforms are showing the work outside my existing audience.
People are arriving from countries I never targeted.
And someone found the experiment and decided to contribute to it.
The machine is tiny. But I think the machine has started.And apparently Saturday finally decided to clock in. About bloody time. 😅
Continue the chaos
Everything mentioned today is waiting here.