Drudge, Edwards Boost YA Bookblog’s Traffic

Last week, Mitali Perkins (left) noticed a huge spike in traffic on Sparrowblog, a website created to promote her novel First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover, where the novel’s protagonist, the young daughter of an Indian-American presidential candidate, comments on real-world news involving the other candidates’ children. Ordinarily, she told us, she’d get 120 page views a day, but last Thursday it spiked to 2,500. Some of the initial traffic came from people Googling the phrase “Cate Edwards picks Hillary,” but when Perkins/”Sparrow” mentioned this on the blog, the newspaperman who wrote the column to which Matt Drudge has misleadingly linked set the record straight, then Elizabeth Edwards added her own comment. It was Emma Claire, the 9-year-old daughter of Elizabeth and John Edwards, who, asked which candidate she liked best, “pointed to a Hillary pin slyly and then, smiling, pointed to her father.” TPM’s Election Central picked up on her appearance, other political blogs followed, and—boom! A 2000% boost in traffic.