Why I Love Reader Feedback

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Written by Kodi Wolf at 4:52 AM

Lately, I've been getting some really cool e-mails from readers letting me know how much my stories are appreciated, which has felt really good. I like to find out the impact my work has had on others and what has worked or not worked for them.

I also sometimes end up learning something I was completely unaware of.

For example, the most recent e-mail I received mentioned that the reader had Googled "lesbian fiction." They went on to say how they'd clicked on the first link, didn't find anything of interest, went back to the search results page and clicked on the next link, which happened to be my site. I went on to read the rest of the e-mail, which was awesome, but by the time I was done reading, it finally dawned on me what the person had said. So, I went to Google and typed in "lesbian fiction" for myself to see what Google spat out.

And holy shit! ... I'm #2 on the list... for the keywords "lesbian fiction"... out of 1,360,000 possible results. I don't even know how that's possible or how long it's been like that. I don't advertise, and my site has basically been defunct for the past few years, despite my work to update the site and get chapters finished.

I also checked Bing, Yahoo!, and AltaVista, and kodiwolf.com is #7 on the first page of each of those, and is #9 on Ask and Dogpile (which appears to compile from Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask).

I'm completely blown away.

I also checked the hit stats for my domain and the numbers have been steadily increasing by several hundred every few months. In January 2010, I had 1,953 unique visitors. It dipped down to 1,890 in April, but last month (December), it peaked at 4,473. And judging by the number of visitors I've had for just the first week of January 2011, multiplied by 4, it looks like I might top 5,000.

People pay thousands of dollars to get on the first page of Google and other search engines and it's just happened to me, and I have no idea how. The only conclusion I've been able to come to is that people are advertising for me by telling their friends about my stories.

So, I'd just like to thank everyone who's been visiting the site and reading my stories and telling others about them.

I'm really sick with bronchitis (caught it over the holidays), but this has completely made my day. This feels amazing.

Thank you.