A main purpose of this blog from my selfish point of view is to learn how to generate traffic from the blogosphere by testing theories and then measuring results. A little while ago I was disappointed that having a title containing the names Paris Hilton and Jeffrey Archer didn't seem to have any impact. On the other hand, recounting the story of the Oxford poker school resulted in a 35% uplift in traffic mainly from gambling sites. More recently I blogged about an excellent mushroom book - its position on the Amazon bestseller list rose from 347 to 71 but it may be that the blog and the sales increase coincided with the beginning of the UK mushroom season. Apart from crude visitor numbers I also monitor the routes people have followed to reach this blog. The bulk come from links from other websites and blogs, quite a few from searches for charkin or charkinblog, but the most interesting ones are those referred from search engines where you can see what people were searching for. Here are some of the searches this morning (excluding the charkins etc). I rather feel most of them will have been disappointed when they got here.
John Marsden
Copies sold inheritance of loss
The great war
Not quite ripe
Dutch rugby association
Schappelle Corby
Yes but is it good for the jews
Waterstones returns
Racist jelly babies
Farewell speeches online
On the publishing side the big news of the day was of course the takeover of Blackwell Publishing by John Wiley for £572m. It is an indication of how times have changed that the bookshops have declined while publishing has dramatically increased in value over the last ten or twenty years. When I started Blackwell was principally a retailing name. I do hope that some of the profits from this sale might be ploughed into rebuilding Blackwells Bookshops as the leading college bookstore chain in the UK. It can and should be done.
And finally a sad moment. Sheldon Meyer of OUP USA died last week. I leave to others tributes about his great editorial skills. I'll remember him for giant dry martinis at lunchtime and for commenting when he received his honorary MA at Oxford that it was thoughtful of them to name the Theatre after him.
