For the first few years of its life, this blog’s readership has increased by about 2.5x every year. However, this year it did not grow. Throughout much of the year, readership stayed on or around 2500 monthly unique visitors per month (total pageviews did go up from about 45k last year to around 60k in the first 49 weeks of this year, though, so that’s something).

Some of the growth in readership is probably masked by the way that I began posting the entire content of (most of) my posts onto Facebook. This undoubtedly reduced the number of clickthroughs from my Facebook page, which (since FB provides the plurality of my traffic) reduced my stats without necessarily reducing my overall readership. In that case, holding steady at 2,500 MUVs might actually represent an audience increase.

Anyway, if I know anything from my writing career, it’s that lulls are inevitable. Even after making my first sale at professional rates, I went two years before making my next one. I also went eighteen months between my third and my fourth pro sales. That doesn’t mean I was becoming a worse writer, it just meant that I wasn’t necessarily seeing an improvement. Similarly, I have faith that if I keep posting regularly, my readership will grow.

That having been said, I think one thing that’s been hampering my blog is that it’s literally my last priority. I often sit down to write my posts sometime around around 11 or 12 PM at night and find myself without the mental or spiritual resources to write anything that’s useful or revealing. I haven’t yet figured out how I’m going to combat that. Maybe I’ll switch to writing the posts first thing in the morning. I find that the early morning and the late night are both not-very-productive times for fiction writing, but that the early morning tends to be a more fertile and imaginative and happy time for me overall. So perhaps blogging in the morning will lead to some systemic change in the content.

I also want to maybe try my hand at writing posts that could, potentially, go viral. I’ve been reading a number of books about viral marketing, and I might try going in that direction on occasion. But otherwise I’m mostly gonna keep doing what I do.