December Stats

In a few hours I'm heading out of town.  I will have my Kindle, three or four paperbacks, my MacAir, my iPad and iPod, and power cords to charge everything.  Hopefully I survive the two and a half days.

What will I do on day two?
(Not pictured: iPod touch taking the shot.)

But, as I'll be out of town on the thirty-first, I'll do the December stats and wrap up, plus a few things to expect from January and "Season Two."

Well, December was an amazing month.  Writing About Writing is really starting to stretch its legs.  We'll certainly break 17,000 Pageviews (probably before I'm done writing this article).  [Edit to add--Just broke 17,000!]  However, we're not likely to get to 18,000 with me going out of town to a place with no internet.  Much of W.A.W.'s traffic is still coming from self-promotion.  If I'm not out there putting stuff on FB, LJ, G+, and Stumbleupon, my hits take a pretty sharp dive.  (That's why I'm always telling people that sharing one or two of their favorite articles far and wide is almost as useful as any small donation.)

By comparison, November was just over 12,000, and I thought that was pretty damned amazing.  However, the VERY interesting thing (to me) is the way the graph looks.  If you take out that spike in August where 20 Things to Sabotage Yourself made a minor blip on Stumbleupon and caused some fluke numbers, you can see since June a pretty steady line of respectable growth.  Obviously we can't keep growing at the same rate forever, but there is obviously reason to keep optimistic about the future of W.A.W.  I know ultimately the numbers are small, and it hasn't escaped me that I just got a $100 check for everything I've done since February.  That's about 8 cents an hour for the work I've been doing, so there are literally sweat shops in Vietnam I could work at and get a 150% raise.

I still don't know what exactly is going to become of W.A.W.  Job?  Career?  Sideline gig?  Or enjoyable hobby?  Will W.A.W. ever do well enough without me aggressively self-promoting that I will be able to back off a little and focus on my fiction?  Will it do well enough that when I do shift to fiction, I'll be able to offer it here at non-retail prices (or even free)?  Or will financial realities force me to pursue more traditional publication routes or even ~GASP~ a "real job"?  I have my dreams and ambitions of course, but I can't control the mercurial capriciousness of internet audiences.  I can only control how much work I do, and how much "faking it until I'm making it" I'm willing to do--especially if I hit some sort of glass ceiling.

Everything's up in the air, but growth like I've seen these past few months is surely the sort of encouraging bellwethers to keep trying.  Of course I could look at it as making $135 in 10 months and get depressed.  Or I could notice that I made 475% growth in the last quarter.

And that's pretty encouraging.

See you all on January 2nd.  And thanks for reading!

[Edit to add: Then again, I might break 18,000 (or come very close).  In the last couple of hours this has happened:

I guess people are very interested in the screen shots of the check from Google and such.

And that brings the December total up to 17, 351.   Now....even though getting 325 hits, two days in a row, on days where I don't post an article or do any self promotion would be...unusual, it is not outside the realm of possibility.  So technically I might come home to find that I'd crested 18,000.  Maybe. ]