This post will be short and numbers based. In a couple of days I’ll publish a long, juicy post reviewing the decade.
In 2019 I published 33% less: 50 posts vs. 75 posts in 2018. The average word count of each was 630. According to WordPress, this year about 56,000 people visited the blog, a lot less than last year. I have no real idea how many people actually read each post but I suspect it’s a multiple of the WP figures: more than 2,000 people read by email, a few hundred via the WP feed, and another couple of thousand between three other platforms where the blog reposts automagically. But whichever way you slice it, the nature of this blog is changing. More thoughts on that in a few days.
Most popular
Another indication of change: not a single post written this year made the list of 10 most visited. So here are two lists:
Overall Most Visited (in descending order of popularity)
- Hild
- Books about women don’t win big awards: some data
- Fries Test for disabled characters in fiction
- New car: an accessible minivan
- So Lucky
- Lame is so gay
- Men are afraid that women will laugh at them
- 30 years ago: a love story in photos
- Huge news: multiple sclerosis is a metabolic disorder
- The Aud books
My Favourites This Year (in no particular order)
- A writing update: Hild, Aud, Ammonite and more
- Kitten Report #10: the evolving disability consciousness of Charlie and George (and all the Kitten Reports)
- Bucket of eels
- An honourable man
- The gift of a negative review
- 30 years in the US
- Passport to a perilous future
- So Lucky wins the Washington State Book Award
- The third decade of the 21st century
- The problem with Ruined Earth novels
Visitors, Referrals
Like last year, readers came to the blog mainly through organic search, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, and from almost exactly the same 150+ countries as last year—still no one from Mongolia, Svalbard, or Greenland, huh—and this time, in the top 10, readers from Ireland outpaced those from New Zealand.
- US
- UK
- Australia
- Germany
- India
- France
- Ireland
- Netherlands
- Sweden
2020
No predictions for the coming year because I am always—always!—wrong.
I always always read your post. They come to me via email.
I always enjoy whatever you write. You are a wonderful wordsmith.
I discovered you when I found “The Blue Place” a great read. Now I have all your books. Really would like The Blue Place on my kindle.
As you can tell I’m a reader not a writer. A reader that enjoys every thing you write
Do you mean I’m not part of a very select few who realize your value?