(Photo Credit: Pintrest)

Anyone that has followed along on my journey as an author knows that we didn’t expect much from the release of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. We wanted books for the family and hoped to sell a few to friends and through Maine Authors Publishing’s website, maybe get into a few Maine bookstores. I wanted to be on Amazon, just to say I was there, but I had no illusions of grandeur as we went into this.

Just as I started the publishing process, I met a man who worked in the publishing field and I told him I was self publishing my book. He told me that the average self published book sells about 100 copies. If it’s a really good one it might sell 500 copies in its lifetime. So this was my starting point. I knew full well that 400,000+ new books a day go up on Amazon. Think about that for a minute. 400,000 brand new titles to choose from, every, single, day. Right now there are 12 million ebooks on Kindle. Twelve million! The reality was clear, especially for an unknown, self published author such as myself. Stay in your lane and don’t expect much. So I didn’t.

That is until we sold those first 400 books easily and I blew past the 100/500 self publishing standard I had been told to expect, before the book had even been out 6 weeks! What amazed me the most though was where these books were going. Until I actually started selling books in person at craft fairs, very few people here in Maine knew about my book that was based on a piece of Maine history!! I’ve said it many times the book sells far more outside of the State of Maine then it does locally.

I think one of the things that is driving that is the topic. The paranormal is very hot right now culturally and The Ghost of Nelly Butler is a pretty awesome piece of paranormal folklore. So that helps a lot. But believe it or not I have found that this blog actually is driving quite a few people to finding the story of Nelly Butler here on my website. That’s right this weekly blog.

About mid way through every week I’ll usually check the analytics of my website to see how much traction my latest blog post has generated. For the record the blog about losing my mother while hiking is still the most read blog on the website. Mom is a powerhouse! The reason I check the read views of the blogs is to try and see trends in what people find interesting and what they don’t. I do want to write things that interest you all!! Like I thought my blog about my laundry would have been quite boring but actually it got more reads then the one about AI and the future of books. Fascinating!

In the analytics I can also see what are the biggest sources of traffic leading people to my blogs. There are the things you’d expect like social media posts or the email blasts that go out with the link for the blogs in them. But what always surprises me is that those are not the main source for how people find my website, my blog or my book. Most of them are finding me directly. Meaning either they are searching for Michelle Shores, the Gathering Room or Nelly Butler specifically, or they are searching the internet for something else. A certain topic of some kind, and my website or blog is popping up as a result for that search. Unbelievable!

If you think the 400,000+ books a day on Amazon or the twelve million ebooks on Kindle are a massive number, just try to fathom the vastness of the internet as a whole and what has to be sifted through every time someone searches for something. Like if you search “Is it possible for old people to hike?” what are the chances that my blog about Mom is going to be a search result? I find it very interesting that the blog that comes in second for driving people to the website is the one titled “Never work a day in your life.” Makes me laugh! I can just see people searching the internet for “How to never work a day in your life.” and then getting my blog as a result! But hey they are reading it!

When I check the blogs for reader interest I also check where visitors to my website are coming from. Or to be more specific where their IPO address is, because that’s all I can see. That and the time stamp and amount of time they stayed on a page. All fascinating for a data nerd like me! Again I’m amazed over and over how few Maine visitors I get and how far and wide Nelly’s story is reaching people.

Just in the past 24 hours, and remember my blog posted last Friday, so nothing new to see here folks, I had visitors from Ilinois, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, California, and on and on. I have over 100+ visitors to my website every day, the majority of them outside of Maine. How is that even possible? In the great vast wasteland that is the internet how are these people finding me? It blows my mind!

Today’s geography check also revealed a surprise!! I had a visitor from Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Seeing this was a shock so I clicked on the little world map thingy and in the past 30 days I have had international visitors from South Africa, Poland, Germany, The Netherlands, Boliva, three from Canada, three from the Philippines (WHAT?) and seven from the UK.

Milions upon millions upon millions of bits of information and books are out there. And somehow the story of Nelly Butler’s ghost is rising to the top and getting noticed. Mathematically it doesn’t make sense. Could there be supernatural forces at work here? I don’t know about you, but it just kind of creeps me out!