What are you looking for?

Good afternoon,

I usually like to spend my Friday afternoons at BooksfromScotland.com thinking about the future of website, and what we can do to make it better. And equally, I like to look at the site traffic to find out what pages work and what don't.

For instance, in July the most-looked at page was, naturally, the homepage. Our features like Scottish Crime and The Publishing Cupboard followed closely behind. We also get a lot of traffic on our book category pages, like Biography & Autobiography and Humour. I didn't find any of this surprising, so I then looked at the search terms which drive traffic through to the site. Now, James Robertson scores very highly - month on month, he and his novel The Testament of Gideon Mack come top of the list. It seems, according to Google, that we're the best place to come for information on Robertson - we're not going to argue with that! What is a little unusual is that he is number 1, every month.

So what else can we find from the website traffic logs? Well, there's been a lot of interest in Alfred Noyes, who isn't even Scottish, but be inspired Nicola Morgan's novels The Highwayman's Footsteps and the forthcoming The Highwayman's Curse. Jessica Stirling also features highly, so perhaps we should prepare a biography or feature on her (or him; Stirling is a joint pseudonym for Hugh C. Rae and Margaret M Coghlan). Crime writer Aline Templeton came third; novelist Andrew Drummond was fourth. We've collected these figures in a new feature for the site, "Most Searched For... Authors". I'm also trying to present this as an "author tag cloud" - very web2.0. I'll update this at the end of August and see how it changes.

I've also done the same for books - Gideon Mack is at the top (strange, people are searching for it but we haven't sold many copies recently). Second is James Hogg's The Three Perils of Woman (so Gillian Hughes' feature on Hogg is well timed). Something completely different - Lorraine Kelly's Baby & Toddler Eating Plan came fourth, and is selling quiet well. Nothing to do with me...

There will be more of these sorts of things coming soon. I like ploughing through stats and databases. Did you know there are 99 authors on the site with more than 50 books?

So what else has been going on? Well, it's party season in Edinburgh, and in the last two weeks I've been to the launch party for the Book Festival (rather fun), a party for Pocket Shorts, from our office neighbours Teebster, and on Monday the Publishing Scotland summer party. I'm all partied out! But it's been a good chance to meet the publishers who sometimes seem just to be an email address. I'll write more about this soon.