Mentioning the Band Throbbing Gristle Might Not Work as Well

This is true. It was Jerome, by the way, who pointed out to me the sitemeter, which has been fascinating new thing to obsess over.

Can't tell all that much about who is coming here, alas. But it's been interesting to see that QS has an international audience. Hello, Denmark, Spain, and the Republic of Korea! Not that we don't appreciate the traffic from Poughkeepsie, New York. Rock on!

Anyway, Jerome then deduced that a literary blog might get a large audience by building its name around certain high-volume search terms -- "Hot Throbbing Books," for example, or "Rolling Papers with High-Speed Pizza Delivery."

It would seem that this worked:

Yesterday's experiment in shamelessly boosting book/daddy's readership was a complete success.... Congratulations to all -- especially to you, the easily duped web slummer.

Really. The use of such terms as "huge throbbing books," "legal weed" and "hot stock tips" -- not even in the title of the website, just arbitrarily listed in a single post -- made that day the highest-scoring Friday this blog has ever had. Those who know blog stats know that Fridays tend to score fairly low among weekdays (the weekend is traditionally the lowest)....It was the third-most-visited day of the month. True, we're not talking teeming millions of readers here, just several hundred either way. But a crude little trick like that -- and zoom. No wonder bookslut is such a big deal.

I post this information as a public service. It is absolutely not a matter of trying to duplicate his results without any expenditure of effort on my part.

"You're going to be reading a lot more about sex, drugs and mortgages on this blog," he concludes. "And maybe diet tips....It's the new book/daddy. Mortgages, light bondage and power aerobics."