I love hosting Number One Novels. I love getting the word out to lots of enthusiastic readers about new authors and their exciting new books (often new series) that are debuting. I'm thrilled that the followership has reached the 180 mark, too. When NON first capped 100 back in August 2009, I was ecstatic. It seemed incredible that 100 unique people go to my blog every week to read new author interviews.
I'm still a bit awed by the fact that 180 or so people follow my blog and on average 140 to 200 unique people visit the blog a week. However, my followership has remained in the 180s since the middle of February, and I've noticed a certain stagnation in the comments—specifically the same group of eight or so people are the only consistent people entering contests. I want to offer more exposure to the debut authors who take the time to fill out my interview and who offer up free copies of their novels to NON's fans. Thus, I've started guerrilla marketing.
On Friday, I cruised through the Shelfari site, hunting for people with similar reading interests as NON's authors. Then I asked to be their friend, along the way telling them a little about NON.
It worked! The follower numbers are now over 190! I'm still weighing whether or not the time to follower ratio is worth the time it takes to perform a guerrilla campaign, but I'm delighted to see immediate results. I was also inspired by all the blogs I found that have 300-1,000 followers! The goal is to reach that critical awareness level with NON so that marketing on my part wasn't necessary and my followers would be spreading the word about all these great debut authors for me. In the meantime, I'll continue marketing from the trenches.
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