Every year I do a retrospective post – or series of posts – in which I take a look back over the previous twelve months on Track of Words, and this year is no different. I’ve now been running Track of Words for eight years, which somewhat blows my mind, and I find it fascinating to look back at how the site has developed over those years. Not just how it’s grown in terms of people visiting, but also in how I’ve changed how I work on it, and the relationship between what I do for the site and what I read in general. In this article I’m going to take a look at a couple of retrospective elements, beginning with some numbers before moving on to reflections on how I did with my goals for 2021.
Numbers
It’s always fun to pull together some stats for a year on the website, so to begin with let’s have a look at my productivity. Much like in 2020, I always intended to take it easier in 2021 than I’ve done in some previous years (I’m never writing 348 posts in a year again, like I did in 2018!), but I think I was still fairly productive:
- Total number of articles: 169 (60 fewer than 2020)
- Total number of words: 252,345 (5.1k fewer than 2020)
A quarter of a million words across almost 170 articles is pretty good I think, and that’s taken me past the 1.5 million words mark! Of course plenty of those words have come in the form of author interviews, but the majority of them are mine. Even if you called it two-thirds, that would still be the equivalent of 10 or more novels over eight years!
Moving on to page views, despite publishing fewer posts than last year – in fact the third fewest ever, behind only 2014 and 2015 – the site was more popular in 2021 than ever before:
- Page views: approximately 240k (an increase of 36% over 2020)
- Site visitors: approximately 123K (an increase of 43% over 2020)
I’ve loved watching the site stats grow year on year!
At the risk of sounding entirely self-congratulatory, I’m genuinely proud of those numbers. I still find it hard to believe that anyone is interested in what I write about, but to think that the site was viewed nearly a quarter of a million times in a single year…that’s amazing. I’ll say this again later on, but thank you to everyone who’s visited Track of Words!
Of course, over eight years I’ve built up a considerable backlog of content on the site (over 1,700 posts and counting), and lots of the older posts still get a steady number of views. That being said though, some of my 2021 posts have done really well – in particular the Black Library ‘guide’ articles I’ve been working on )you can find all of these in the BL Guides section). In January I rewrote my ‘New 40k’ reading list article and brought it up to date with the ‘current’ timeline, and that article has been incredibly popular, generating over 46,000 page views on its own (about 19% of the entire 2021 total). On the one hand that goes to show just how much interest there is in 40k fiction, but on the other hand I think it’s a clear indicator that Black Library is not doing a good enough job of helping readers to understand how it all fits together! Ah well, at least I can help.
Let’s break things down a little further, splitting articles out by type. Of the 169 articles in total that I posted in 2021 there were…
- 76 reviews, of which:
- 52 book reviews written by me
- 5 book reviews written by guests
- 19 short story reviews
- 39 interviews, of which:
- 37 single-author/editor interviews
- 1 translator interview
- 1 multi-author interview
- 54 blog articles, of which:
- 12 Monthly Roundups
- 11 Black Library guides/reading orders
- 10 guest posts
- 3 Cover Reveals
- 1 piece of original fiction
- 17 assorted articles
As expected, the overall number of reviews and interviews is down from 2020, but I’m pretty happy with the general spread of content there. It’s noticeable that my output of short story reviews has really dropped, impacted in large part by Black Library stopping publishing ‘Digital Monday’ stories (I used to really look forward to each of those), but 52 book reviews is pretty good, and I’m delighted to have started publishing a few guest reviews as well. I don’t foresee myself wanting to bring anyone else on board as a regular, frequent co-writer, but I’m very happy to work with other people on guest reviews now and then!
This was the first ever guest review on the site
I’ve talked elsewhere in varying amounts of detail about my decision to focus less on Black Library fiction and broaden my horizons to cover more of the wider SFF genre, and I definitely think that’s had an impact on these numbers. For example I only reviewed 11 BL books in 2021, compared to 30 in 2020, and only 10 of my 2021 interviews were about BL releases, compared to 27 in 2020. Where I did focus on BL this year though was in putting together ‘guide’ articles, which were pretty good fun to write. I can’t say for certain, but I imagine this trend will continue in 2021, with the occasional BL review or interview and maybe another guide or two depending on what takes my fancy. Of course if any BL authors would like to get involved on the site and arrange reviews, interviews etc. then please do get in touch, and we’ll see what we can work out!
The one type of content that increased in number in 2021 was blog articles, driven largely by the BL ‘guide’ articles I’ve already mentioned and a fair few guest posts – several across the course of the year, and then a bunch during the Advent Calendar series. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these as much as I’ve enjoyed working on them, and I’m keen to publish more like this in 2022. I’ve got plans for a few already, and hopefully I can arrange for a reasonably steady stream of these throughout the year! If you have any ideas or requests, or would like to contribute something, by all means get in touch and let me know!
2021 goals
Back at the start of 2021 I wrote an article talking about my goals for the year – you can read that here. I might put something similar together for 2022, but in the meantime I want to have a look back at how well I did (or didn’t) in terms of meeting last year’s goals. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but I think it’s worth quickly looking at each one, even if just for my own benefit!
Reading challenge: 52/104 books – SUCCESS
I always set myself the challenge of reading 52 books in a year, and the last couple of years I hit that so quickly I then doubled the challenge to 104. Once again I passed that by a considerable margin, reading a total of 136 books (novels, novellas and non-fiction books, but not including short stories) over the whole year. I’m pretty sure I won’t manage anywhere near as many in 2022, but that’s ok – I had a lot of fun reading this year!
Check out these articles (from the 2021 Advent Calendar) for my thoughts on the best books I read in 2021
Reading goal: maintain a good reading balance – SUCCESS
The gist of this was that I wanted to choose more books to read simply for the fun of reading, to make sure I have a good balance and don’t end up burning out or not enjoying what I’m reading. I definitely hit this goal – I read 136 books in 2021 and wrote 52 reviews, so clearly I read plenty for fun! My choice to review fewer BL books definitely helped with this.
Reading goal: do better with more diverse authors and stories – PARTIAL SUCCESS
I ended up mostly focusing on reading more books written by non-male authors, and in that respect I was pretty successful. In the end the gender breakdown was 51% written by women and 40% written by men, with the remaining 9% split between non-binary authors and male/femals writing partnerships. I could still do a lot better in terms of broader diversity, with less than 10% of my 2021 books being written by non-white authors. Must do better in 2022.
Reading goal: explore more IPs – PARTIAL SUCCESS
On the one hand I did read much less Black Library fiction, with BL books accounting for only 24% of my total reading, compared to 38% in 2020 and 62% in 2019. In the end though, I generally read much less IP fiction than in previous years, and I didn’t read quite as many Aconyte novels as I had hoped to. That being said, I did read one Star Wars novel – Ronin by Emma Mieko Candon – that was probably the best example of IP fiction I’ve ever come across!
Writing goal: more guide articles – SUCCESS
I wrote 11 Black Library ‘guide’ articles in 2021, so I think that counts as a success! That tailed off a bit towards the end of the year, but for a while there I was really on a roll – and my new, updated version of the ‘New 40k’ reading order has proven incredibly popular!
Writing goal: more non-Rapid Fire interviews – FAIL
While I did put together a broader range of author interviews than usual in terms of covering fewer BL books and more general SFF, the vast majority of my 2021 interviews were still in the same sort of format. That being said, I did really enjoy the Warhammer Crime and Women in BL interview with JS Collyer, Victoria Hayward, Jude Reid and Danie Ware, and likewise my interviews with translator Nikki Kopelman and author Ada Palmer (which went much deeper than usual).
Writing goal: have fun with a wider variety of articles – SUCCESS
In general I would say that yep, I worked on a pretty good range of content from more of the ‘guide’ articles and more cover reveals to a bunch of really cool guest posts during the Advent Calendar. I could still have done more I think, and I’m still keen to see if I can come up with some totally different types of articles to write myself, but overall I’m very happy with 2021’s variety.
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So there we go – that was 2021…here’s to a great 2022! I haven’t quite decided upon goals for 2022 just yet, but if I do then I might put together a separate article to talk about those. In the meantime though, to reiterate what I said earlier, whether you visited Track of Words once or a hundred times last year, thank you so much – I enjoy writing this stuff anyway, but it really means a lot to know that people are interested in reading it too!
If there’s anything you would like to see on Track of Words in 2022, or if you’ve got any comments or questions about this article, please do let me know. You can get in touch in the comments below or over on Twitter.
If you’d like to support Track of Words and help me to keep working on new content, you can leave me a tip over on my Ko-Fi page.
