TiM 15 promotion results · 11:27am Sep 10th, 2019
The promotional project on TiM: Gone, not Forgotten has run its course over the past week. Now it’s time to take a look back, pointing out what has actually been done, what results that produced and what future prospects said results generate.
What was done
About half an hour after the release of ch.3 I started adding the story to the pre-screened groups. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I had to cut the first session short at about half the total groups. I finished adding the story to the other ones about five hours later.
A couple of groups have been discarded at the last second. After all the additions, TiM 15 counts 44 different groups. There were zero initially. Only one promotional message was posted, due to poor pre-screening on my part.
The addition to various groups have been enough in quantity and tempestive enough in time to constitute, in my personal and baseless opinion, a significant sample to gage the effectiveness of groups as a promotional tool in August 2019.
Observed results
On ch.3 there have been only three comments, all from returning readers. There have been no differential comments. The global number of ratings still sits below ten.
An unforeseen consequence has been a noticeable inversion of tendencies in views count. On promotion day, the story marked a new record of daily views, edging out the previous record established on the day after release. Another way to look at this number is that there were between 30 and 35 unique views on promotion day, meaning less than one view per group.
What can be improved
A forum post tailored to the story I'm trying to promote will have a greater impact than the generic one I used. This guide is a good starting point, the forums of The shameless self-promotion boureau and Epic Adventure, High Fantasy, and Sci-Fi are rich of good examples.
When pre-screening groups available for promotion, I should also track how many folders a story is allowed in. Some groups, like The Barcast, have only one folder in which public submissions are allowed. Some others prefer that a story be added to all applicable sub-folders. Other groups prefer that any story be added to only the most fitting of the applicable sub-folders available. Tracking the availability of a promotional forum post should have been a priority, not an afterthought.
Conclusions
"well, that didn't work"
--Eakin, Hard Reset (2012)
Let's not beat around the bush: none of the proposed goals was reached. This ought to constitute a failure.
For a story with similar views and engagement numbers as TiM 15, promotion through groups might still make sense. A view record, small as it may be, is still an achievement worth celebrating. However, any story with even slightly greater numbers will receive neglectable benefits from generic groups.
This project doesn't investigate universe-specific groups, typically composed of a small but dedicated fanbase. It makes apparently little sense to think of one such group for TiM so many years after the start of the series, especially when the vast majority of its viewers are already direct followers of the author.
