We only got back from the US yesterday and I’m still jetlagged and shattered from a week with the in-laws, so don’t have the brains for a proper post. However, since it’s the end of a year, I thought I’d have a look and see what the most popular things I’ve posted this year are. Oddly, there’s a lot of tiny things that I’d almost forgotten I’d written that have done very well.
Tenth most popular post of the year was part three of my Seven Soldiers series. The Seven Soldiers series also accounted for my ninth, sixth and fourth most popular posts. (If everyone who had read those posts had bought the book they were compiled into, I’d now have a lot more money. Unfortunately, the traffic for those all came from a Bleeding Cool link before the book was out. Oh well.)
Eighth most popular was my whinge about indie writers’ lack of professionalism.
Seventh most popular was my review of the Monkees’ Manchester gig.
Fifth most popular was this one about All-Star Superman, now collected in Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Third was my rant about how godawful Connie Willis’ latest book is.
Second was the post where I just copy and pasted the tracklisting for the then-upcoming Beach Boys Smile box set.
And the most popular post of all was… (drumroll)… the one where I complained about changes to Google Reader and asked for alternatives.
Meanwhile the least popular post of the year, by a very long way, was part VII of Doctor Watson Investigates, with ten readers. That’s one fewer than a post reminding people to vote in the 2009 Euro elections had this year. Even the most popular of the Doctor Watson posts, the first, had only 104 views total, and most of the others are bumping around the twenty views mark. This suggests that my initial plan of doing more of those is probably a bad idea as nobody’s interested. I’ll finish the story over the next few days though, for the ten of you who are reading.
It does also seem, though, that I have discovered the secret of blogging popularity – just post an angry rant about something that annoys you that is somehow related to ‘geek’ interests like the internet or science fiction, and you’ll get all the traffic you can handle…
Plans for next year are:
Finish the novel proposal I’m working on
Finish and publish How We Know What We Know
Finish and publish Bigger On The Outside
Write a book on the Kinks
Restart and actually write the Cerebus book
Write vols 2 and 3 of the Beach Boys book
Write more about politics (this year’s events have just been too depressing).
Happy new year to you all.
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
Where do the figures come from? Do they only include page views by people who actually click through to this site? I’m reading and enjoying Dr Watson, but in my feed reader so I might not show up.
Actually, looking at it in more detail, a lot more people seem to have seen those posts in their feed readers than have clicked through. They’re still a lot less popular than anything else, but a fair number of people have read them, so thanks for the reminder to check that.
That said. I really only write this stuff for the handful of regular commenters anyway, so it means more to me that you like the story than the number of hits would.
I must confess, I’ve been waiting for Doctor Watson Investigates to be complete before I read it. Don’t give up on it!
Oh, I’m definitely going to finish this story – only two more parts to go – but it’s whether I do any more that’s in question.
Dec. 28th is maybe not a time to expect a flood of readers? And many people may be waiting ’til it’s complete. But even if they aren’t…my goodness, Andrew, if you don’t write more Dr. Watson stories then who will?
True, but all of the Doctor Watson story parts are among the very lowest-ranked posts of the last year, and they’ve had very few comments. I think it’s safe to say that they’re my least popular posts. I might write more if the ebook sells well though.
So put ’em someplace where they’ll be more popular, right? (Okay, off the top of my head I don’t know where you might put ’em, but there’s got to be someplace…)
I wouldn’t expect fiction to get many comments because there’s less to discuss than with posts that have some kind of argument. And if there’s no discussion then people are less likely to come back to the page again to catch up on the comments.
Surely they’re low-ranked because they’re more recent than almost all your other posts!