In case there’s anyone who has yet to notice, 2018 is over, and that means 2019 is full of hope and promise… or maybe cynicism, depending on your outlook.

Before I get into my own plans for 2019, I’d like to stick to my now-annual tradition of looking back at our stats here on RSPC for 2018.

Time for some humble number bragging, a.k.a. the Numberbrag!

Alright, let’s start with the big metrics — those on the main stats page for WordPress:

• Views: 7,924
• Visitors: 5,531
• Likes: 1,865
• Comments: 110
• Posts: 247

You can see from that screenshot that our 2018 Views and Visitors each eclipsed their 2017 counterparts. We also had more Visitors in 2018 than we had Views in 2016 — the type of arbitrary benchmark I look out for as I track our stats across the year.

However, once thing bothers me about this picture. See that red arrow? I hate that red arrow.

More specifically, I hate where it is pointing: a tiny sliver of white/gray space between my 2018 Views total and the 8,000-View line at the top of the graph. I wanted to break that proverbial ceiling in 2018, and I really thought we would.

But then winter came.

November and December had 648 Visitors and 888 Views combined. Compare that with May 2018, our single best month, where we had 557 Visitors and 740 Views. In short, November and December sucked, and had me (irrationally) thinking that our blogging efforts were sinking into oblivion.

Content Numbers

In past Numberbrags, I’ve taken a closer look at which posts performed the best for the previous year. I’m not going to do that, at least not right now.

Instead, I want to have a look at the types of content we published this year, by category. Obviously, I’m going to leave off the ‘Writer’ categories, which we use on every post to distinguish our own work. I think we’re all well aware that I write way more than my ghost-like counterpart, Jessie.

Now then! Here is where our 247 posts fell this year, according to category:

Poetry: 115 posts

It should come as no surprise that this is our largest category, since my regular haiku and basically all of Jessie’s posts fall in here. My Haiku Sundays have been running strong for nigh on three years, and I have no plans to slow down.

The Warden of Everfeld: 55 posts

This is my catch-all category for both Memento and Legacy, the two books I have in this loose series so far. Obviously, since Legacy is yet to be released, I’ll continue using this quite a bit.

Hopefully, however, this will be a little less frequently than in 2018. I will freely admit that I leaned on this category, leaning on easy-to-write updates on my writing progress like a crutch. I will definitely continue to update ya’ll on my writing of WoEL, but ideally only when I have some legit updates to give.

Seeing as how I’m still guilty of this in my Dad-Life non-writing updates in 2019, this is a work in progress.

Thoughts: 36 posts

This is our category for basically anything that doesn’t quite fit into one of the others. I like that this gets somewhat frequent use — about thrice per month. I wouldn’t really want to see this number grow unless we create another category for a more specific subject that would have previously fallen here.

Reviews: 18 posts

Jessie admirably carried this category for us in 2018, when she had a nice run of nearly-weekly book reviews around the summer. I’ve tried to expand my review posts to TV and movies, but I didn’t do as many album reviews as I would have liked. Honestly, I didn’t happen upon as much new awesome music as I would have liked in 2018, so that’s part of the problem.

Reviews across media are definitely a big part of my plans for 2019.

Creativity Sessions: 11 posts

I must admit, I’m a little disappointed in myself with this one. This is my own category where I write about the writing process. I used to aim to post at least one of these per month, but that clearly fell by the wayside, perhaps because I was doing less writing and more post-writing/publishing things.

Marketing Your Novel: 6 posts

This, again, is my own category through which I talk about marketing strategies. I didn’t write a lot here, but that was sort of by design. Rather than discuss marketing theory, I wanted to demonstrate how I was actually using this knowledge to promote my own novel, such as in this post.

Of Suits and Sirens: 2 posts

Jessie successfully buried the title of her upcoming sci-fi novel in a post, so I created a category and asked her to begin writing more about her WIP in preparation for publication and Awesome Con. Two posts is not great. Hopefully, this category will be much more robust in 2019 (ahem, Jessie!)

The Grand Mythos of Úr’Dan: 2 posts

I created this category very late in 2018 so our dear readers (you) could follow along with news about my upcoming fantasy series on Wattpad. The series is still upcoming, and this category will see a lot more use in 2019.

Sharing the Love, a.k.a. Reblogs: 2 posts

As strange as it may sound, I’d actually like to use this category more in 2019. Sharing posts from other bloggers or even links from other sites helps spread ideas and get other writers’ names out there. This won’t be a weekly fixture, but I’d it to be much more regular moving forward.

Moving Forward

As I’ve indicated above, Poetry will always be a mainstay of this site, whether it’s Jessie’s missives or my haiku. I think we can do a lot more with Reviews, especially now that I’m finding and meeting more indie authors who can always use help getting their names and their works out there.

Reblogs can help us connect with other bloggers more, and Thoughts can be interesting asides from our usual work. And of course, our WIP categories (WoE, Mythos, Of Suits and Sirens) will continue to be important.

However, the Warden of Everfeld category will be seen a bit less, because I’m cutting down on my ‘Friday Write-Day’ posts. I frankly do not write enough to justify a weekly word count update, at least right now. I’m thinking bi-weekly, but we’ll figure it out.

Marketing Your Novel will likely become more about sales and focused around my convention efforts this year, which is an exciting new blogging avenue.

And finally, Creativity Sessions should be more significant this year. Will we have new categories? Who knows? Will these slight changes do anything for our stats in 2019? Who knows?!

It’s all in good fun.

Steve D