The Power of The Blog – Revisited 30th July 2010.

Maybe a blog is a very powerful tool indeed, or maybe it’s simply coincidence.

Conspiracy theorists beware, coincidence is a very powerful force in nature; just ask the originators of chaos theory! But I digress.

When I first started this blog I complained about the lack of sales information feeding through from some of the retailers and the length of time it takes them to report sales, information arriving months later.

Within a couple of days one of the retailers appeared to have taken notice and reported for the period up until the end of March. I thought that was progress and hence the tongue in cheek post to this blog the next day.

Now I wake up this morning to find a nice surprise. Our aggregator now shows the same retailer has reported sales for the following months, and two other previously reticent retailers have reported sales too.

I now have a very long and very detailed spreadsheet to go through and reconcile each individual sale against those already reported and since we’ve already finalised Quarter 2, post the newly received sales information into the current quarter.

That may sound unfair, but we have to report sales to our authors at fixed points in time and we have to cross check all those figures. We’ve already done that for Quarter 2 and if we abandoned that process and started all over again every time this happened – we’d never actually report. None of these retailers have actually reported up to the end of Quarter 2 as yet anyway. We don’t see another option.

Still it’s always good to see more sales figures and certainly two of the retailers have exceeded expectations. Mind you, it does seem to be short stories that are moving in volume. I wonder if that’s the commuter influence? You know, have a quick read on the train or bus into work. A 3,000 to 5,000 word story on an e-reader works a treat. Oops sorry about the pun there, it wasn’t intended.

Maybe that’s a marketing angle.

Buy four commuter length stories and get Friday’s free.
Wonder how easy that would be to set up on our web site?

Hmmm.............