From Marketing to Writing§

Starting a Novel

A few months ago I looked at Google’s Webmaster Tools site to find information about my web sites. It provides facts on how Google searches a given site. I discovered some interesting statistics about my writing site, this site. One section shows the search terms or phrases by which people find my site. For the top search phrases, a few hundred people find my site each month. Not all click on the link they’re given, but it’s interesting to know what attracts their attention.

Although the second most popular search phrase for my site had about five hundred people a month, the number one search phrase by which people find my site had over 10,000 hits a month. I checked further back and found that over the course of a year, there were over 120,000 people a year. I don’t want to say the search phrase at this point. I will say, though, that it was a phrase indicating a sadness in the searcher and it was tied to an article I wrote for this site.

It occurred to me that if I were to write a novel with the title the same as that search phrase, I would attract the attention of at least 120,000 people a year. If I were to self-publish the book and sell it on Amazon, but promote it on my site, I should be able to sell at least a few thousand copies. That may not seem like much, but those are good numbers to begin to establish myself as a novelist. It could lead to getting a New York literary agent and a contract with a top publisher for another novel afterwards. I’m particularly excited about this possibility.

I started writing the novel today, using a small notebook that fits in my back pocket for making notes about the plot and characters, as well as writing the first twenty pages or so. You can see and read the opening lines of the novel in the photo here.

Twenty pages hand-written will be enough to get me started. Later, I’ll copy everything into the computer and continue writing there. I expect to write it rapidly since I’m excited about it. Keep checking here for updates on my progress.