Was recently tooling around WordPress and I saw the stats page. It made me go like, oh yeah, there’s a log of how many people visit this site. In the early years of this blog, I was obsessed with it, since I was seeing exponential growth: the number of visitors doubled each year. But then the number of visitors leveled off at about 2,000 unique monthly visitors, and that’s where it’s been for the last two years.

Of course, this does obscure some growth in readership, because I used to just post links to my blog on Facebook. As a result, it was my site’s biggest driver of traffic. But I realized that was silly–why make people click through?–so I started directly posting to FB. As a result, I probably have five hundred or so readers on FB and maybe a few hundred more who read it through WordPress’ internal reader app. And then fifty or a hundred on RSS feeds. But certainly less than 3,000 unique monthly readers.

Which isn’t really amazing. It’s hard to break out as a blog nowadays. All the hits are on inward-facing platforms. If I really cared about building a readership I’d go to Medium or Tumblr and cultivate a following. Or I’d try to sell articles to Buzzfeed or Slate or Salon or something.

It’s okay, though. It is what it is! At this point I’m just hoping that when my book comes out, I’ll get a spate of new blog readers. People are always like, “Oh yeah, you need to get on social media in order to sell books.” But I prefer to see it the opposite way. I want to sell books so as to increase my social media readership =]