The Aardvark’s Tongue

It’s summer - time to heat things up.

Hopefully as you have been poking around the blog you have come across our Stranger than Aardvark Fiction category entries. We thought we were strange ones as we were dreaming up imaginary items and putting the book together (I mean a Shellacked Llama Bladder-Spittoon - get serious). But sadly no. As it turns out there are individuals who are creating actual items that exceed even our bad taste (interested in a Deer-Rectum Door-Ringer?

Email us, your Stranger than Aardvark Fiction item and win a free copy of Sun-Dried Aardvark-Tongue Swizzle-Sticks

Also, if you haven’t done so already be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
One excerpt from the book in your inbox, free, weekly.

This week we updated the format of the blog.
We gave it a new look and while we were at it we decided to add a weekly book excerpt page - if you don’t want to buy the book you can read it for free. This week’s installment is the Flying-Squirrel Trap-Shoot-Kit.

Be sure to check it out and to check back. We will be adding a RSS feed to it to help those that don’t want to receive it by email. Any other suggestions are gladly welcomed.

My friend David Alison started blogging recently and yesterday made it as high as #5 on the front page of Digg with his entry What happens when a Windows developer gets a Mac? The post was Dugg over 1900 times yielding more than 65,000 unique visitors to his blog. And the upshot for us? We received 8 referral visits from David’s post about our book and two of those visitors signed up for our newsletter - a 25% conversion rate! Thank you David, we are grateful for every reader.

So, it looks as if things have leveled off. Now 5 weeks in for every un-subscriber there is one new subscriber. Sales are at 4% of the newsletter subscriber base - which is better than anticipated (if only slightly). Web site traffic has also leveled off. There is a peak after every newsletter then it tapers off daily until the next one. It is time to move to new tactics but thankfully nobody’s career is riding on the sales of the book so we can go about changes in our leisure time if necessary.

So tonight is mailing #4 of the weekly newsletter, this week’s installment is the Disposable Box-Turtle Poop-Scoop. This should be a good litmus test of who wants to stick around (I was going to send the Yawning-Hippo Stereo-Speakers but I thought the sphincter reference might be a bit too much too soon. Much safer to go with poop).

Last week’s installment saw an equal number of unsubscribers and subscribers. Perhaps we are turning the corner. In terms of sales - for every 10 subscribers we have sold one book. That’s good (I think).

If you have advice, please feel free to share.

Faced with the cold hard reality of the actual newsletter - the actual humor from the book - the sickness that is this twisted publication the unsubscribe rate has risen to 3.6%. Does that make us sad? No actually, it’s better than anticipated.

We began with just under 800 friends and acquaintances on the mailing list. We were anticipating an unsubscribe rate of something more like 20 to 25%. Plus we have picked up a few subscribers to the newsletter along the way so we are at 98% of our original numbers.

Book sales are slow (10 books) but hey, the email newsletter is still the only form of marketing, and it has only gone out twice.

So the stats:

• 800 subscribers to start
• 29 people dropped off the list (3.6%)
• 14 new subscribers (2%)
• 10 book sales (one sale for every 100 subscribers)

And we are only 2 weeks in. Not a landslide by any means, but not too shabby either.

Oh, and our bad…on the newsletter we have forgotten to add that it is powered by poMMo (which is awesome). That omission will be remedied in the next mailing.

So the launch of the website, via the newsletter, got off to a herkey-jerkey start today. While I don’t have very many people in my personal database apparently I sent out emails at too brisk a pace for my web-host - so they shut me down. Waaaaat? Lesson learned - spoke to the host and learned the rules. Let’s hope the rest of the campaign is a bit more successful.

Lots of excited emails from friends and acquaintances however. I think we are all looking forward to this experiment.

It is 1:07 AM, Tuesday February 5th. The site went live 7 minutes ago.

I finished recording the audio at midnight. Burned a CD. Verified that it worked. Printed the label. Checked the PayPal shipping rates. All is all good. Ready to roll.
Now, bring on the orders.

The books arrived early! To say we’re excited would be an understatement (they look awesome). The best part of it was the delivery driver - he saw the “Sun-Dried Aardvark-Tongue” marking on the boxes and asked “Is this some kinda Chinese love potion or sumthin?”

Yes…I suppose it is.

A key component of our marketing plan is the newsletter (I know, I know - I said some time ago I would detail the marketing plan and I haven’t done so yet). Being a big advocate of open source software (and not wanting to pay for software) we have decided to go with poMMo. It was really easy to upload and get running. We are have encountered a couple of small bugs but the support forums are great and sorting them out has been easy. As we get nearer the launch you might want to sign up for the newsletter so you can get free book excerpts and announcements when they are ready.