A Personalized Career Guide
When I shared my first book, “Dungeons & Qubits: an Adventurer’s Tale Beyond the Quantum Computing Tutorials,” on June 6, 2021, I simply uploaded the PDF to Google Drive and posted the link everywhere I could. I didn’t anticipate any degree of popularity, so I gave zero thought to analytics, even the most basic one: the number of downloads. Hopefully, for a free book, at least a few people would read it. And, preferably, one or two people might even enjoy it. Because I had committed myself to enjoying the writing process, those metrics would’ve been sufficient.
A New Home
I quickly realized that people were reading it. Some people messaged me about it, other people shared it, and a few people even wrote articles about it. But, now I had a dilemma: I had no idea how many people were reading it that weren’t doing any of those things. I could not have had less analytics on the file.
So, I started using a URL shortener which at least tracked clicks. “Dungeons & Qubits” had already been out for a while, and yet I somehow tracked hundreds of clicks. That’s pretty shocking. What could the original number have been?
Also, I recently uploaded “Dungeons & Qubits” as a document on LinkedIn. I merely wanted to see what analytics the social media platform provides, and the post supposedly received thousands of views, far more than the number of connections I have, over the course of just a few days. Again, that’s pretty shocking, even for a free book. After all, I shared the book 11 months ago; it’s not exactly fresh.
Thanks to Dr. Brett Donovan of Quantum Zeitgeist, I was inspired to find a new home for “Dungeons & Qubits,” “Choose Your Own Quantum Adventure,” and, hopefully, all my future books. Enter payhip.
Payhip addresses the shortcoming of Google Drive. First and foremost, though, is you can still download my books for free. Beyond that, I can see the number of visits, the number of downloads, and, ironically, the full suite of Google Analytics. I had no Google Analytics on Google Drive, but I have Google Analytics on payhip. Go figure.
Another interesting feature is that downloaders can choose to pay what I’m calling “monetized compliments.”…
