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If you are interested in the mechanics of making an online novel work, you may find this interesting.

One of my resolutions this year was to cut our site’s bounce-rate, the proportion of readers that leave the site without looking at a second page. According to Google Analytics, the average bounce-rate for small comics and animation sites is around 50%.

Our average bounce-rate over the past three months was 80%. Over the past two months, 66%. One month, 63%. Two weeks: 61%. One week: 59%. Three days: 55%. That’s pretty good, especially when you consider that Superhero Nation is a very young site, about four months old, so most of our viewers are first-timers (who are far more likely to bounce).

I attribute our drop from 80% to 55% to several key changes.

The first of these is the header. We’ve had eight variations of the header so far, but I’d like to focus on the last two because Google Analytics has a month of data on each.

Two months ago, we used this header. (I shrunk it slightly to fit, but if it is cut off on your computer, you can click the header to see all of it).

I don’t think that this header is awful. It’s actually much better than some of the wretched monstrosities we’ve struggled with.

A month ago, we switched to the following header, which we currently using.

I believe that the header change is the single biggest reason our bounce-rate has dropped from 63% to the mid-50s over the past month (I’ll discuss some other factors later).

The old header sounds a bit more like it’s advertising a movie than a novel. Anybody can be somebody sounds like a movie tagline. I like that wordplay, but the phrase fails to make a sell to prospective readers. OK, anybody can be somebody, but why should we read Superhero Nation? The book is “dedicated to everybody’s favorite superpower,” which is another nice pun (if you understood that the “superpower” in question is the United States. But that still doesn’t answer the question: why read Superhero Nation?

I contributed two mistakes to the original. I suggested that we allude to the Gettysburg Address by using the phrase “dedicated to the proposition that.” In hindsight, that’s pretty obscure (to our audience) and snobbish (to everyone). Additionally, I suggested that we call it a “grim comedy.” But I’ve been writing the chapters that center on the supervillain, which are grim, so my perspective was skewed. The work as a whole is decidedly not grim, so misportraying it may have scared off potential readers. The lesson here is that you need to know what you’re selling so that you can market it honestly. (Honesty as a market imperative rather than a moral one… who knew?)

This is our newer header, reposted for your reading convenience.

We made three main changes: the text, characters and logo placement.

The text was almost certainly the most important change. Our pitch to readers is clearer: instead of rambling about “everybody’s favorite superpower” and what proposition the book is dedicated to, we say that we’re offering an unbalanced and wacky comedy. Why should you read Superhero Nation? Because you want wacky comedy.

The second change was the movement and addition of characters. In the old header, we had three characters: Lash on the left, Agent Orange in the middle and Jacob on the right. We made room for Catastrophe (near-left) and Agent Black (near-right) by stacking the characters instead of spacing them out. Although some readers liked the empty space, I think our surveys show our readers slightly prefer the new look. (That is consistent with Google Analytics’s bounce-rate data).

Finally, we moved the logo from the bottom-left to center-right. It distracted too much from the characters in its original position. Now, the header helps me divide the two clauses of the text-box (“A fairly unbalanced guide…” and “putting the laughter in manslaughter…”) in an attractive way.

Yeah, that’s our header art (if you would like more advice on making headers productive, please read this article). Now, I’d like to talk about the useful changes we’ve made to content, organization and links.

We had a content problem because we accumulated so many articles on superhero writing that our list was unmanageably long. We modified our list of articles by removing all but a few of the most popular articles from our sidebar widget and then adding a link to the complete list. It feels less visually intimidating.

Research indicates that less can be more. Seth Godin reports that Borders increased its sales by decreasing its selection of books and then facing the books with their front-cover (instead of the spines) towards prospective readers. Likewise, a Columbia study found that people were more likely to buy a jar of jelly if presented with 6 flavors rather than 30. Having too many choices makes people nervous and hesitant. Moving the less popular pages to a separate index is a good way to offer prospective writers a taste of our advice without overwhelming them, I think. (This is a great opportunity for a case-study, but I don’t know how to set up controlled experiments with site variations… Pat!)

In terms of article editing, B. Mac has been working a lot on shortening past articles by cutting or revising awkward sentences. He concluded that “halving the length of our Eragon review has doubled the average time a reader will spend reading it.” He says that he has also tried adding links to suggested followup articles to the end of particularly popular articles. For example, “if you liked our List of Superpowers, you may find our List of Superpower Problems useful.” He says that the links haven’t seen much action yet, but he needs a few more weeks to be sure.

Article updating at Superhero Nation always comes back to the List of Superpowers. That page draws so much of our incoming traffic that reducing its bounce-rate is a perennial goal.  Over its lifetime, the List has bounced over 95% of its 15,000 viewers. Ouch. Over the past 2 months, B. Mac corrected some formatting issues and the bounce rate has dropped to 77%. That’s still much higher than the rest of our site. For example, Ask a Gator (an angry rant about crocodiles) only bounced 45% of its readers. Somehow, over the last month Ask a Gator has drawn more site-traffic than the List. Go figure! I have no idea what people are searching for, though… I don’t get query information on Google Images.

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