New York Times Book Review: Readers’ Response to Advertisement of This Blog in Their Tuesday, February 19, 2019 Newsletter

The New York Times Book Review, published every Sunday, has two newsletters that are emailed to interested subscribers every Friday and Tuesday. The Friday newsletter provides advanced access to the complete contents of the upcoming Sunday Book Review. The Tuesday newsletter is an abridged retrospective.

To see whether readers of the Book Review would have any interest in this blog, I scheduled ads for this blog in its newsletters of Tuesday, February 19, 2019 and Friday, March 8, 2019.

The headline of both ads is “Do Fiction Writers have alternate personalities?” The ad is a link to this blog. If a reader clicks on the ad, they come directly to this blog.

In response to the first ad, there were significantly increased visits to the blog. But after three days, visits to the blog were back at their pre-ad rate, which I interpret as indicating no significant interest in this blog by Book Review readers.

One reason for lack of interest could be that most people routinely use smartphones. Between one-half and three-quarters of people responding to the first ad were using smartphones, which do not show the main features of the blog, like its Search Box, which you need to access the blog’s posts on 200 great writers.

Also, a greater number of Book Review subscribers read their Friday newsletter than read their Tuesday newsletter, so it’s possible that the response to my ad in the upcoming Friday, March 8th newsletter will be bigger.

But they just may not be interested.