Ask anyone what the best internet search engine is and you get one answer- Google. Google it if you don't believe me!
Every once in a while, I Google 'True On Average', just to see where it pops up on the list. I scroll through the first one hundred hits, then stop. At this point, websites about baseball, economics, penis size (...), and spider consumption by sleeping humans all check into the top one hundred ahead of my pointless little blog. (I assume we make the list eventually but I always cut off my search after one hundred results.)
I last did this one day in November. However, frustrated with the lack of results, I then popped over to Bing, Google's 'rival' (in the sense that ice and heat are 'rivals'), and did the same search. And wouldn't you know it, True On Average checked in at #3! I'm not sure what will be easier- getting this blog up to #3 on Google's results page or getting everyone in the world to start using Bing as their primary search engine. (Stay tuned...)
In thinking over these, er, 'events', I was reminded of a comment I believe I've referenced once before on this space. It came during 'Writer Idol', a highly-entertaining event during the Boston Book Festival. This event featured three publishers serving as judges of audience-submitted manuscripts. In the process of explaining their decisions, the publishers served up a number of insights into the industry of book publishing.
The most memorable idea from the event came about halfway through. A judge revealed to us audience members that her rule of thumb is to consider whether ten thousand people would spend twenty-six dollars to buy this book.
I'm not sure what the intended effect of this revelation was. From my perspective, I found it emboldening. Anyone can convince ten thousand people to do anything. (1)
So to apply the idea to my search engine shenanigans, if my goal was to have any collection of ten thousand people find the blog via search, I would be best served by doctoring the results a little bit and using optimization techniques to improve the blog's ranking. But if my goal was to have people who tend to run phrases like 'true on average' into their search engines click on this blog ten thousand times, a better approach might be to find a way to get those people to switch their main search engine.
I suspect writers seeking publication run into this type of conundrum at one point or another. Do they optimize their work to make it the best possible piece of writing? Such a work will likely appeal as broadly as possible but may have little relationship to whether ten thousand people choose to buy it if it fails to reach some threshold of relative quality.
Or, do writers seek their niche? This means trying to get ten thousand purchases from the type of book reader who will seek a specific kind of book purchase. I'm leery of this approach. It seems a recipe for reducing the quality of writing (and lowers the maximum return for the publisher). To return to my search engine analogy, perhaps the question is whether a blog that is found via Bing is of higher absolute quality than one found via Google.
But in the context of getting those required ten thousand readers, the approach is a very tempting one indeed.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Well, this is true, but what if they lend out their copy?
One could argue that book readers exhibit a variation of the 'network effect'- one person reads a book and says it is good, thereby making it a more useful, valuable, or prestigious read for the next person. So in the end, it might even be a smaller number than ten thousand people if one concedes that a good enough book (and your book is good enough, no doubt about it, dear reader) will sell additional copies through recommendations or gift purchasing.
