10 Hits and Misses for 2016

Since I started this blog six-and-a-half years ago, I’ve had over 1.6 million visitors, 3300 on my busiest day, with over 20,000 comments on the 1,376 articles I’ve written about 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, but always about the art of writing.

If I didn’t look at the statistics on my blog, I would guess that the most read posts were about how to market what you write. Last year, the series I wrote on Genre Writing Tips was wildly popular. This year, a series I call Descriptors–sixty-nine collections on how to describe a variety of stuff you include in your stories. The second most popular was Tips by Genres–covering 23 genres from Cozy Mysteries to Young Adult (which is the inspiration for my upcoming A to Z participation).

What a surprise to find out what you-all actually are reading. I am thankful for the WordPress statistics section. Here they are–my top 10 and bottom 10 of 2016:

Top Ten Hits

1. 51 Great Similes to Spark Imagination
2. How to Describe Nature
3. How to Describe a Landscape
4. 35 Weird Traits Your Characters May Have
5. 65 Ways to Describe Sight and Eyes in Your Writing
6. 178 Ways to Describe Women’s Clothing
7. 103 Most Beautiful Words? You Decide
8. How to Show (Not Tell) Emotion–E to O
9. How to Describe Your Character’s Home II
10. How to Describe a Fight

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

1. 103 Most Beautiful Words? You Decide
2. Word Count by Genre
3. Plotting a Story–with a Spreadsheet
4. 7 Tips for Literary Fiction Writers
5. 13 Tips for Cozy Mystery Writers
6. How Many POVs is Too Many?
7. 4 Ways to Plan Your Writing
8. 21 Tips from Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”
9. Funny One Liners I’ve Read in Books
10. 19 Self-editing Tips

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

Top Ten Misses

1. 11 Tips You Don’t Want to Miss about Writing a Novel
2. How to Virtually Visit a Location You Can’t Drop In On
3. Writers Tips #84: 20 Hints that Mark the Novice Writer
4. The Funny Side of Writing
5. 5 Must-have tools for Writers Conferences
6. Writer’s Tip #14: Similes and Metaphors Have Rules
7. 7 Tips to Avoid Email Phishing
8. 7 Tips to Avoid Email Phishing
9. Writer’s Tip #4: When to Follow Rules
10. 6 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Blogging

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, and the thriller, To Hunt a Sub. She is also 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, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her books at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning. The sequel to To Hunt a Sub, Twenty-four Days, is scheduled for Summer, 2017. Click to follow its progress.