Daily Archives: February 1, 2015

Writing

Making ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ Easy

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You ever search the internet to find out about that often given advice about showing and not telling for authors?  And when you go to the advice, it basically says that you should show rather than tell, and that’s it.  No telling you how to do it.  No showing you how to do it.  Well, someone wrote a very simple way to do it.

Writers Write gives five very simple ways to achieve this.  You can see examples of how it’s done, and they’re all done in simple, easy to understand terms.  This is incredibly useful.

It also provides a link to another article that tells you about when you should tell, rather than show.  Very nice.  I love finding easy to understand advice like this.

Blog

Month in Review – January 2015

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2015 started off with a bang, as the numbers increased dramatically in January.  Several records were smashed.  What a month it’s been! I was able to stick to 2 posts a day, which I never thought I could do a year ago.  The blog now has 729 followers, an increase of 71.

January Stats

January started off very busy, carrying over from the dramatic increase in traffic at the end of December.  But it didn’t stop.  It kept increasing and reached a big high.  The end of the month slowed down, though, but maintained an average of more than 100 views per day. In fact, 23 out of the 31 days were over 100 views, with 2 being over 200.  There was a lull in the middle of the month with some issues on WordPress’s side keeping stats.  This has been rectified.  The busiest day was January 20th with 250 views, just 7 shy of the current record.  There were 3,698 views in January, making it the biggest month yet. It was the first month over 3,000 and the fourth consecutive month over 2,000.  At the end of the month, there was a total of 29,404 views.  There were a record 73 posts in January, bringing the total to 796.

The month ended with 4,626 comments, making that a record 659 comments in January.

The top 10 countries were:

  1. United States (2,428 views)
  2. United Kingdom (290 views)
  3. Canada (288 views)
  4. Japan (217 views)
  5. Australia (84 views)
  6. France (31 views)
  7. Norway (30 views)
  8. Spain (22 views)
  9. India (21 views)
  10. Singapore (16 views)

Top Posts

The top five most popular posts written in January are:

  1. What Is the United States (168 views)
  2. Bilingual Breakthroughs (139 views)
  3. Authors Answer 10 – Least Favourite Genres (73 views)
  4. How Cold Is an Old Japanese House in Winter? (64 views)
  5. Authors Answer 9 – Favourite Genres (56 views)

My most popular post written before January was again INTJ – An Analysis of My Personality with a total of an incredible 371 views. Most popular ever in a month.

Posts that I think you should take a look at once again are:

Reviews

I was able to get two reviews up in January, but I’m all caught up.  I’m currently reading a couple long books.  The reviews were:

Social Media

On to Twitter and YouTube now.

On Twitter, I have 2,411 followers, which is an increase of 96.  I follow 2,382, which is up by 63. I finished with 6,497 tweets, with 151 coming in January.  More posts means more tweets.

On YouTube, I haven’t done much in the way of videos recently.  I have 40 subscribers, an increase of 2.  The month ended with 7,282 views, which is a small increase of 131.

Looking Ahead to February

With only 28 days in the month, I don’t think I’ll beat January’s high of 73 posts.  I also don’t think I’ll beat January’s views total.  But I’m being conservative.

Series like Authors Answer will continue as always, and I hope to get some interviews up, too.  There will be some more posts about countries, as well.  The Hugo and Nebula Award project is coming, too.  And I’ll have a newsletter up and running.

As for reviews, I hope to have at least 2 up this month.  I’ll be finished one book soon.

February will continue to be busy, so look forward to it!