This was almost a politics post

On November 10, 2025November 10, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.

Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:

Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:

The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?

Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.

LOL

On June 24, 2021June 24, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

Man, guys, WordPress really wants me to know about that 200th post.

Blogwanking 2020

On December 30, 2020December 30, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I’m not doing a saleswanking post this year– I had no new releases, and went to no cons, and didn’t really market my books at all or, really, do anything to make people remember I occasionally write fiction other than a handful of haiku and short stories on Patreon, so I’m not even looking up how many books I sold this year. I would be surprised if it ended up being more than a couple dozen.

But the blog?

You’re not going to see these words in this order very often, but: 2020 was a very good year, if only in this one minor respect. The blog, no doubt because everyone was home all the goddamned time, had the best year it’s had since the Great Virality of 2015-16. Check the stats:

68000 page views and 40K visitors are both up from last year, and in fact are both up from any year since 2016, which still benefited from the Syria post; it’s possible that without the big bump from that post this would have been the best year since 2014, which continues to make no mathematical sense. Comments are also up, although Likes are down a bit, which is frankly the least important to me of the various metrics I’m looking at.

Why? Well, to start, I wrote a lot:

Highest total posts since 2016, more than one a day, and there were only a handful of days this year where I didn’t post. More words than any year since 2015, and the second-highest words per post of all time. Ultimately the only gripe I can come up with looking at this is that I’d still like to see a lot more engagement and comments, but I keep hearing about how blogs are dead, so maybe that’s why I don’t get as many comments as I used to, and that 5.8 comments number in 2014 isn’t exactly a hotbed of competing opinions.

Total word count over seven and some change years: 1,181,069, not counting this post. That’s … a lot.

Let’s talk posts next. No secret, because this has been the case for years: a lot of site traffic is driven by my perennial posts, and none of the top 10 posts on the site were written this year. This is just an image, but here’s the overall top 10 posts and the number of hits they got:

None of this makes any sense to me, particularly the fact that the fucking Snowpiercer post is still my second-highest yearly views.

This year’s top 10 posts, in order from highest to lowest traffic, are:

Nothing completely inexplicable in there except maybe for that one Monthly Reads post; I’m not sure why that one post would have done so much better than all the rest of them, and the Christmas Abortion Story post was only written five days ago and is on the list already, which is either a sign that the top 10 posts of this year are really weak or that it’s maybe heading toward blowing up. We’ll see if it keeps showing up next week or not.

Geography? Let’s talk geography. This is this year:

And this is over the life of the blog:

And I gotta be honest, y’all: I look at that and I’m proud of it. My stupid little website isn’t making me any money and it isn’t making me famous, but people from damn near every country on Earth have visited it. I mean, what’s left? North Korea and Turkmenistan, both of which are dictatorships; Svalbard Island, where less than 3,000 people live, and several countries in Africa where I suspect reading Western blogs is not a high priority.

Basically, I feel like I have a chance to land a lucky hit from Svalbard at some point, and the rest of them are probably never happening.

I thought about finishing this post with some goals for next year, and … honestly, I’m dialing back on the entire concept of “goals” right now. My one social media goal is to have more followers on TikTok than on Twitter by the end of next year, and I bet that’ll be the case by the end of this school year. For the blog? I’m going to keep writing; this place has been part of my daily life for over seven years and that’s not changing any time soon. I’d like to see those higher numbers become a trend and not a blip, but I’m not going to break my neck over it.

Seriously, though, if one of you ends up heading to the far north or North Korea at some point, make sure to hit the blog up.

In which I am viral

On April 6, 2018April 6, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

So yesterday morning I wrote a nine-word snarky response to a tweet from the MIT Tech Review. I write two or three dozen tweets in more or less exactly the same tone as this one every week.

It appears to have hit a nerve.

To put this in perspective, this tweet, in barely over a day, has now reached over three times as many people as this entire blog has in the entirety of its existence. And now that the western hemisphere is starting to wake up again it’s starting to speed up from the 2,000-impressions-per-minute pace that it kept up while I was asleep last night. I think I’ve probably got a solid day at least before it starts slowing down so I imagine it’ll double those numbers.

I’d kind of prefer that the most popular thing I’ve ever written be a blog post or, God forbid, a book, but it’s still fun watching the numbers go psychotic. And the ratio is unreal, so I’m not getting a ton of responses relative to the numbers and 98% of them have been supportive. Not like I have time to notice anybody to argue with them, at any rate.

So that’s going well

On November 19, 2015November 19, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

rusnrd6jsjs4njnofrit That little post about Christianity and the Syrian refugees yesterday got 636 pageviews, a single-day record for any post not involving Freshly Pressed. The site in general had 890, with 620 unique visitors. As of this exact second, 6:33 in the AM, we’re looking at the fourth most popular post written in 2015 (total 733 views) and absolutely the fastest-moving thing I’ve ever written for this space– remember, this is still in less than a day— because even the Snowpiercer post took a minute to get moving.

Also as of right now: 347 shares on Facebook, a number that has changed while I’ve been writing this and is close enough to half the total number that Snowpiercer has amassed that it’ll probably be there by the time my son wakes up in a few minutes. (EDIT: It got six more before I hit “post,” so it’s there.) It’s already at nearly 100 views today, and it is, again, 6:36 in the morning. I can’t quite call it “viral” yet, but it’s definitely doing quite well.

Also amazing: I haven’t had to slap any trolls around yet, although I don’t expect that to last.

Maybe I’ll get my 100K pageviews for the year after all.

Now all I gotta do is get these folks to buy some books. Good morning, Internet.

Blogwanking with numbers, just because

On June 24, 2014June 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing23 Comments

So, this post is gonna be full of graphs. I feel like people have expressed some interest when I’ve done stuff like this in the past, so a blogwanking/mathy type of post every few months might start to be a more regular thing around here.

Disclaimer: I’m not bragging and I’m not whining. Some of you will not be doing this well and some of you will be doing WAY better. I don’t know that I have useful advice, but I’m good at taking it. 🙂

First, let’s look at daily hits over the last few weeks:

The interesting thing about my traffic is that without actually feeding everything into a spreadsheet (I’m not that far gone yet, but I keep almost doing it) is that I can’t really figure out when my good days are. Good times to post seem to be roughly every three hours– around 9, around noon, around 3, and around 7-9, which sort of breaks the pattern– but I don’t seem to have a single day or couple of days where traffic is better than others. Let’s look at weekly traffic:

Note two things: one, the huge jump in December, that stuck around for a few months and then went away, the enormous (and inexplicable) spike in April (I wasn’t Freshly Pressed or anything like that; I still have no idea where those views came from or why) and the steady build in traffic since the crash after that. I’m right about at the point where I was where traffic spiked in December again; it’ll be interesting to see if it happens again.

Here’s monthly, showing the same phenomenon, basically:

This month will edge May by a few hundred hits, I think, meaning I’ve had increasing traffic three months in a row, which is good. Still not up to December’s numbers but I feel like they’re coming.

Now the (mildly) depressing part– but, again, I’m not whining, I swear. Let’s look at book sales. The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 went on sale on May 10 and has had two free days. One I went to some trouble to promote, the other I deliberately did virtually nothing for. Sales are the red line and free copies are the green:

It has not escaped my notice that you can barely see the red line for most of the graph. Incidentally, I think the book’s going free again around my birthday in about a week and a half. Unless I decide that putting the book free on 4th of July weekend is as bad of an idea as making it free on Memorial Day weekend was.

Let’s take a closer look at sales:

Shit ain’t making me rich, obviously. I’ve never had a day of double-digit sales, and haven’t had a day with multiple sales since the week the book was released. Two days in a row with sales since then have been rare, too, and that dry spell for the first half of June was discouraging. Now, again, the goal for this book has not been to make me rich, and as soon as Skylights is out, it’s probably going to go permanently free. I’m also probably not going to go with the Kindle Select program again, because… well, you see the results of letting Amazon have the book exclusively. If they’re promoting it, I don’t see the results.

Not that I’m promoting it as much as I could be. I know you guys see a lot of it around here, and there’s Facebook and Twitter, but I’d be willing to bet good money that nearly every single copy has either gone to someone who already reads the blog or knows me personally or both. Maybe 95%. Thing is, that means that free or otherwise I’ve moved over 100 copies of my book to my readers on a blog that gets 200 hits a day; I can’t feel bad about that.

I still need to find some promotion methods that reach beyond my immediate audience, though. I’m working on some possibilities and am way open to hearing about more. And since I’ve got the grant I’ve got some room for paid advertising, too, if I can find anything that I think will convincingly work.

Meanwhile, I gotta keep working on the next book, and the book after that.

Oh, Twitter, right. See if you can pick out exactly when I started working on increasing my Twitter followers:

It’ll be interesting to see how long I’m able to keep up spending time on babysitting my Twitter presence and whether it’s going to prove useful in the long-term. My theory that no one ever clicks on links on Twitter appears to still be true; even with a couple hundred new people who haven’t seen previous promotional opportunities for Benevolence Archives, blog links and book links regularly go without being clicked on at all. Right now Twitter is still slotted in my brain under “fun” and not necessarily “useful,” but we’ll see what I can do to change that.

The Facebook page has 67 Likes, I think. There’s no graph for that.

Weird

On April 14, 2014April 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking9 Comments

Anybody else seeing a noticeable spike in traffic today? Going to no particular posts, and from waaay more countries (the US is currently only accounting for about 25% of my traffic– and it’s still the largest single country) than is typical in a day? I have more unique visitors already today, without a post, than I usually have in an entire day, and they’re much more spread out geographically than usual– but no referrers that would give me a clue as to where it’s coming from. Anyone else seeing that?

In which OMG ENOUGH

On December 12, 2013December 12, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking9 Comments

I’m posting too much today, I know; it’s been kinda a weird day.

Anyway, blogwank of all blogwank questions: This blog has been around for six months, give or take. I just hit my 500th follower today.

Is that good? Is 500 a lot? I don’t know how to calibrate my sense of accomplishment around here. Those of you who actually comment once in a while, how many followers do you have and how long has your blog been around? Just curious; I promise not to post again today unless something really funny happens. And even then I might save it until tomorrow.