10 Hits and Misses for 2015

Since I started this blog six-and-a-half years ago, I’ve had almost 1.2 million visitors, 3300 on my busiest day, with over 14,000 comments on the 1,238 articles I’ve written on every facet of writing. I have several columns:

• writer’s tips (sign up by clicking here)
• book reviews (Fridays)
• tech tips for writers (occasional)

In between, I write what’s on my mind. It may be about the craft of writing, trends in the industry, how-tos, or how my writing business is doing. I like to keep articles short, so you can finish them with your coffee. You’ll rarely find one over 1000 words. Do you like short articles, or long ones? Take my poll, and then read on:

If I didn’t look at the statistics on my blog, I would guess that the most read posts were about the art of writing–how to do it and how to market it. I would guess that the series I wrote on Genre Writing Tips was up at the top of the list because it was wildly popular. Interestingly enough, while these did get lots of comments (see my upcoming post on my most-commented articles), they didn’t get the most visits. In fact, the most popular articles this year are the same categories as last year–a series I call Descriptors–how to describe a variety of stuff you include in your stories. The secobnd most popular was Tips by Genres–covering 23 genres from Cozy Mysteries to Young Adult.

Here they are–my top 10 and bottom 10 of 2015:

Top Ten Hits

1. 51 Great Similes to Spark Imagination
2. 103 Most Beautiful Words? You Decide
3. 35 Weird Traits Your Characters May Have
4. How to Describe Nature
5. How to Describe a Landscape
6. How to Describe Your Character’s Home II
7. How to Describe an American–if You Aren’t
8. 65 Ways to Describe Sight and Eyes in Your Writing
9. How to Show (Not Tell) Emotion–E to O
10. How to Describe a Fight

This year, all top ten are about describing characters, setting, and plot. That’s a first–I see readers are definitely looking for writing help.

If I remove all the description articles, here are the remaining top ten:

1. Word Count by Genre
2. Plotting a Story–with a Spreadsheet
3. How to Write
4. 10 Tips Guaranteed to Rescue Your Story
5. Funny One Liners I’ve Read in Books
6. 5 Reasons I love Research
7. How Many POVs is Too Many?
8. What’s an Amazon Vine Voice?
9. Grammarly–online or resident grammar checker
10. The 15 Biggest Writing Blunders (And How To Avoid Them)

Here are the ten that received the least amount of activity, but were no-less carefully-written:

Top Ten Misses

1. 17 Tips on How to Market Your Books Online
2. 18 Good Reasons I’m NOT Doing NaNoWriMo
3. 15 Tips Picked Up From Twitter
4. 10 Tips Guaranteed to Rescue Your Story
5. How to Add Humor to Dull Characters
6. 6 Tips That Solve Half Your Tech Writing Problems
7. Why I Don’t Get Writers Block
8. Book Review: Spycraft–Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs
9. I Heart Neologisms
10. Yes You Can Publish Direct to IPad

What were your most popular posts on your writer blog? Give me some topic hints for this year!

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer,  a columnist for TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her book at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning.