Ten Thousand Views

According to JetPack this morning, my blog has gotten 10,000 views. That’s incredible! I know there are blogs that have gotten a lot more than this, but I didn’t expect my blog to have gotten this many!

I’ve made a lot of posts, maybe 2000 or so. That means my average post has gotten maybe five views. But they add up, and five per post is not bad for a humble little blog that is just my meanderings.

I should plug my books at this time, because my books are where this blog started. You can find my magical realism (?) and Christmas romances at this link: https://us.amazon.com/stores/Lauren-Leach-Steffens/author/B08KHCNJ3W?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Thank you for reading!

Testing my Theory

I have a theory that posting at 8 AM on a Tuesday morning (Central Daylight Time, UTC +5) will yield very few hits. I’m testing it here.

In the app Loomly, the app can tell you which times are optimal for posting to each platform. It’s a strategy I use for determining when to post. Not always, but often. Loomly does not connect to WordPress, so it’s not useful for determining times.

Another thing is that WordPress has a more world-wide spread. I have readers on occasion from India, Cameroon, the UK, many other African nations, Bangladesh … This is not the case on other platforms. What is the optimal time for these places?

So consider this a test. Let’s see if I get even my normal amount of visitors.

Readers

Yesterday was my best day ever as far as engagement on WordPress goes — 65 hits and at least 24 (hard to count them) likes. I think I have figured out how that happens one day, and the next there’s hardly any hits. It all has to do with whether your post makes the front page. And by some strangeness, I think three of my posts found their way to the front page yesterday.

Photo of woman sits on the wooden bench and working on laptop computer outside

There are so many of us on WordPress, all wanting hits. There are only so many of us who can spend time on the front page. What is the algorithm and how can we take advantage of it? I honestly don’t know, or else I would. I would love to have a lot of readers.

I have about 100 followers, but they’re not regular readers. I think I have about 10 regular readers. What would I do with 100 regular readers? With 2000? I think I’d fall over, and then when I recovered, I think I’d occasionally promote my books.

Does anyone want to read my books? Here they are.

2001st Post!

This is my 2001st post! I missed post 2000 because I wrote in answer to one of WordPress’s prompts. But I’ve actually stuck to this for 2000 posts!

My first post was Calling All Creatives, and it had four views. I get a few more views now, but would still like more readership. My most popular post was an anniversary post which got 65 views. My 2000th post was on the prompt “My Most Valuable Lesson” today.

What have I learned from 2000 posts?

One doesn’t get to 2000 posts by deciding to get there; one keeps writing one at a time until it happens.
Posts are better with pictures.
Using the supplied prompts boosts number of readers, and some of them stay on as regular readers.
WordPress does a far better job of sorting out riff-raff than Blogger. I have no more links from webcam girls showing up in my feed.
I can’t predict which posts will become more popular.
Not every reader likes the post, but enough do.
2000 posts is a lot of posts.

Here’s to 2000 more posts!

Staying Optimistic

I’m an author. I have self-published and sold books. I don’t have much of a following, and I don’t have the confidence-boosting event of an agent liking my work, but I’m serious about writing.

I still don’t know where writing will lead. I suppose I should assume that if my writing hasn’t gone anywhere in the five years I’ve been self-publishing, that it’s not going to go anywhere. But I’m optimistic, because the most important thing to me are the words and their meaning. Everything else is beyond my control to a great extent.

I don’t know if I believe in God, but I pray for success. I don’t specify what success looks like, because I don’t like telling God what to do. I also don’t think God is going to get me a publishing contract, but maybe They will help me see success when it’s in front of my eyes. Maybe I’ll see a new way to publicize my work. Maybe I will have a strong desire to let writing go.

My definition of success is having readers who want to read the next novel in the series. Readers whose imaginations visit Barn Swallows’ Dance or the neighborhoods of Chicago where my characters live. People who know who their favorite character is. I want people to feel welcome in my world. Maybe I can have that success.

We shall see. I will never have any success if I give up.

Hope and the writer

An acquaintance told me the other day that every single last one of you are bots.

It may be true — for some reason my readership is down to ten most days. (Probably the fact that I was doing short NaNo updates, which aren’t all that interesting, I guess).

I’m still writing in my blog, and I will keep writing in it for one reason: Hope. Hope is the conviction that there will be better outcomes. It’s what helps us through those things we have no power over — after I have done all the corrections, the dev edits, the query letter improvements, I hope that I will get published. If I keep publishing blog entries and advertising them on social media, I hope I will have readers.

Hope is what keeps me going in the absence of progress.

Taking stock of the blog

These are the things that I’ve learned in writing this blog.

My blog gets an average of 20 hits a day. I would like to up that, but that might not change till I have a product (a published book). Let me know if I’m wrong.

The national origins of my readers will always surprise me. The other day, a reader from Vietnam showed up. I’ve had visitors from Singapore and Egypt lately. Among my regulars are Germany, Poland, Portugal, India, Ukraine, and Russia.

I know virtually nothing about my visitors. I know what time of day they visit, how often, what they’ve read. I do not know who they are or why they’ve decided to visit. As far as I know, I know nobody from Portugal, Ukraine, and Russia. I don’t assume that my Polish, German, or Indian readers are the people I know there. I know that either Russia or Ukraine houses that annoying SEO bot that occasionally drops me URLs to webcam girls. (I don’t go there).

I will keep writing this blog. It may change direction as my needs as a writer change, but it will probably always be a combination of creative writing, musing about writing and being a writer, and the occasional “this is what my life looks like right now.”

Expectations

I’m down to twenty readers, but I am assured that all of you are real people instead of bots or that the CIA is no longer reading this for hidden messages — just kidding. I think. Thank you for following me.

I’m at a loss as to how to get more readers. This is my big worry about embarking in self-publishing as well. In a world where everything is screaming for attention, how does one actually get attention? Quality is not enough, as is evidenced by many industries — music, books, movies — where the hyped gets more interest than the small shining gem of a creation.

What’s enough? I’ve never stopped to consider this.

Expectations have a way of expanding. At the beginning of this journey, I didn’t know if I could write 50,000 words. Then, as I reached that point, I expected to be able to write whole novels which grew to 80,000 words or more. Then I expected to get published, which hasn’t happened yet but could happen if I self-published. Yet now I expect to have more than twenty people read my blog. And I expect them to comment occasionally.

Maybe I should scale my expectations down. Maybe twenty faithful readers are enough. Maybe self-publishing, with its potential of only a handful of readers, is enough.

Ready to Quit?

My tarot reading for today (Deck: The Good Tarot, a positive psychology/affirmations deck) says it’s time to decide whether I want to continue writing or not.

For all my threats of giving up, I’m not sure I’m ready. The problem is that when I want to quit, I’m running on feelings and moods, which in my case can run rather intense. What’s worse, I’m running on that primordial soup of past hurts that it’s easy to fixate on:

I thrive on recognition.Recognition is the positive attention that kept me going through a rather negative childhood.

I don’t deal well with rejection. (Who does?) As an overweight, highly intelligent, awkward child, I received a lot of rejection so I tend to overreact to it.

I don’t like being made a fool of, having been the butt of jokes much of my life. I’m afraid I’m being a fool by continuing to hope.

On the other hand:

I see myself as a hopeful person

I highly admire perseverance

I like the image of being a writer (although I wrestle with whether I need traditional publishing to feel like a writer)

I like writing. A lot. Editing, not so much. Querying — I love the optimism I feel when I send out a new query. I hate rejections.

I love to have people discover my writing.

The key, though, is that if I quit only to find that someone picks up Prodigies, I would un-quit in a second. If I had readers, especially ones I could communicate with, I would write with and for a community.

Quitting won’t get me what I need. So, how do I get what I need out of writing?