I've been crunching the CCLaP numbers at Google. The results are interesting.

The arts organization I own, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, will eventually be a money-making operation just like any other small business, and of course that makes me interested in knowing just how many people are checking out CCLaP's stuff at any given moment. But I'm also one of those people who believes that a creative website's effectiveness is not best quantified through the pure numbers of people showing up; better, I think, to try to figure out the more elusive figure of just how influential that site is being, just how much it's shaping the popular culture around it, just how highly regarded it is among people who are interested in that topic.

So how to do that? Well, here's an experiment I've been wanting to try for awhile, so dedicated an hour this evening to doing: I simply copied various book titles I reviewed at CCLaP in 2007 and pasted them into Google, just to see where CCLaP's review would rank among all the results returned, only paying attention when the CCLaP result was #100 or better. See, I figure if some book nerd ends up getting really serious about a title, really wanting to do a deep search online about it, many of them will be willing to check out results up to ten pages in (or at least would go no further than that, and let's face it, with most of them probably going no more than four or five pages, or 40 to 50 results). I ended up testing out 30 titles before getting tired of it, and the results were surprising to me -- exactly 20 of them were within the top-hundred results for their title search at Google, or an entire two-thirds, with 18 of those 20 ranking within the top 50 results as well, 11 of them in the top 25, four of them in the top ten! Wow!

Here's the list, for those who are interested; I've bolded any result where the total hit count was over 10,000, in that in those cases, my book review is literally within the top one percentile of all things online being paid attention to by others when it comes to that book.

The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq: #70 out of 12,000
Glasshouse, by Charles Stross: #60 out of 22,000
Jamestown, by Matthew Sharpe: #48 out of 32,000
The Exception, by Christian Jungersen: #47 out of 4,800
Crooked Little Vein, by Warren Ellis: #45 out of 46,700
The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger: #40 out of 4,200
Infoquake, by David Louis Edelman: #35 out of 10,000
dermaphoria, by Craig Clevenger: #28 out of 5,400
Mister Pip, by Lloyd Jones: #26 out of 59,000
The Whole, by by John Reed: #24 out of 37,200
Consolation, by Michael Redhill: #21 out of 10,300
Lucky Man, by Ben Tanzer: #20 out of 4,400
Jezebel, by Lesley Hazleton: #20 out of 1,600
The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies: #18 out of 20,100
The Slynx, by Tatyana Tolstaya: #12 out of 2,000
The End As I Know It, by Kevin Shay: #12 out of 1,200
God is a Woman, by Ian Coburn: #7 out of 5,200
Grand Avenues, by Scott Berg: #7 out of 300
The Chess Machine, by Robert Lohr: #6 out of 3,200
Radiant Days, by Michael FitzGerald: #3 out of 1,200

And then when it comes to the ten books where my review didn't make the top-100 link results, six of those are highly popular ones, with 50,000 or more total hits per title (Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics [61,000]; Miranda July's No one belongs here more than you [75,200]; Haruki Murakami's After Dark [77,200]; Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist [90,000]; Chuck Palahniuk's Rant [135,000]; and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, with a whopping 238,000 total links online); these are all books where even their listings at Goodreads.com are barely making the top 100 links. And so that basically leaves four books out of the thirty I checked where their popularity is low enough to expect me to rank in the top 100, but I simply didn't: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo; The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall; Soon I Will Be Invincible, by Austin Grossman; and The Uses of Enchantment, by Heidi Julavitz. And I'll take that; I'll take four out of thirty, especially given that two of those are unusually popular with bloggers, while the other two are both written by feminists. (UPDATE: I don't mean to say anything bad about feminists by bringing that up; I just mean that fans of those books are unlikely to consider me as a white male exactly an authority on the subject, which is why it's kinda unsurprising that my reviews of those books don't rank very high at Google.)

Some conclusions I draw from all this data...

--First, let me admit that these are much, much better results than I was expecting; CCLaP's only been online for 18 months now, after all, and before that I had never held a critic job in my life, or published nearly a single online book review. I'm astounded that so many of my reviews are already showing up in such high positions relative to these books' overall fates at Google, 66 percent of them during this test when I was expecting more like 10 to 20.

--That said, when you look at the numbers, you can clearly see that I'm having a much bigger influence among the smaller books, and especially ones from basement presses; of the top ten of my best-ranked reviews, for example, seven of them are for books with less than 5,000 total links at Google altogether. And this makes me even happier than the general numbers, because this is exactly the part of the arts I'm most hoping to influence through CCLaP; I do the reviews of the more popular books mostly for fun, to draw an audience, and to give people well-known litmus tests so they can gauge their opinions against mine, but it's the smaller books where I'm really hoping to influence their fates, and to really have a serious impact on their sales by doing a long positive write-up.

--And speaking of which, I'm of course gleeful like a little boy to see my review of Radiant Days ranked as #3 there; only Amazon and the book's official site come before it, with my review in that case actually beating such usual front-page stalwarts as Barnes & Noble and Powell's. That's been one of my absolute favorite books since opening CCLaP, so I'm glad to see that my insanely positive review is one of the first things others find when Googling it.

--And along those lines, I'm also really surprised to see three of my five reviews of Booker-nominated titles make this list too; in fact, out of curiosity I went ahead and looked up my review of last year's eventual Booker winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering, and found that it's already ranked #74 out of a whopping 66,000 total links to the book now online. Relatively speaking, that's one of the best results of any title mentioned today, and that review is only six months old at this point! Who knew people were going so nuts for my Booker essays?! Anyway, so that's already had a powerful influence on me, just tonight while crunching the numbers; the next time I'm down at the Harold Washington, in fact, I've decided to pick up as many Booker nominees as I can get my hands on, and make a real concentration on them this winter just like I did last winter.

Anyway, so that's that; I thought I would just throw these numbers online, since I was already figuring them out, but it's too "toot your own horn" to run at the actual CCLaP site, which is why I'm running it here. And maybe that gives people a better idea of what I mean, whenever I say that when it comes to opinionated, passionate, creative websites, it's not necessarily the raw numbers of visitors that matter the most.