A Big Milestone

I reached a big milestone with Track of Words recently, and at the risk of sounding utterly self-indulgent I wanted to write a little something to mark the occasion. I’m in my ninth year of running Track of Words, which in itself feels bizarre to think about, as I can still remember writing my first review way back in 2014. Since that day I’ve reached various milestones, the biggest of which being in 2018 when I published my 1,000th post and then in 2019 when I hit a million words written on the site. This latest milestone might be the biggest yet though – as of about 10.30pm on the 9th June, my WordPress stats showed that Track of Words had just passed one million page views!

That’s right, my niche little website has been viewed over a million times! In fact as I write this, the page views are at a little over 1,001,000 and counting. Of course that’s small fry compared to a lot of websites, but it feels like a huge number for me, and I can’t quite believe it to be honest. Here’s the proof, though:

It’s a strange feeling really, to think that my reviews, articles and interviews have been read – or at least looked at – so many times. Writing (or indeed creating) anything and putting it out there for strangers to read is a weird experience in its own right. I imagine authors, artists and musicians feel this even more than I do, but as a reviewer or a blogger it can certainly feel quite vulnerable at times. You put your opinions and observations out there for anyone to see, not knowing how many people will read them, what they’ll think of your writing, whether people will agree with you, whether someone’s going to join you in raving about a book or come at you in opposition to what you’ve written.

Blogging or reviewing can sometimes feel like a thankless task, an uphill struggle where you put your heart and soul into work you do for free only for nobody to read a review you spent hours working on, or for some anonymous online commentator to leave a nasty, thoughtless comment about a book you’re trying to support. It’s a lot of work, a serious commitment, and often genuinely difficult both mentally and emotionally. In the nine years I’ve been running Track of Words I’ve seriously considered packing it in more times than I can count…but then there are moments when I’m reminded of why I do this, and what I get out of it. It can be something as simple as someone reaching out to say they liked a review, or that they bought a book based on one of my recommendations.

Similarly, while stats and numbers are really not the be all and end all (if even one person reads a review and enjoys it, then I’m happy to be honest), I’d be lying if I said I didn’t keep an eye on my page views, and it’s always nice to know that people are visiting the site. To know that my page views have passed one million, though…that’s amazing. I have no way of knowing how many of those views resulted in a reader agreeing with me, or even enjoying what I wrote, but I’m grateful for every one of them! It makes a difference to me, and definitely helps motivate me to keep writing. So if you’re reading this, whether it’s your first visit to the site or your hundredth, I would just like to say a big thank you. I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read here, but I’m grateful you took the time to visit regardless.

I don’t want to waffle on for too long, but as well as saying thanks for all the views I thought I would give a quick bit of context to that figure of one million. As I said earlier, I started Track of Words back in 2014, and (according to WordPress) in January of that year I had a whopping 34 page views. That went up to 206 in February, 511 in March, back down to 240 in April, then gradually increased until reaching a little over 13,000 in total by the end of the year. That felt like an incredible achievement at the time, and far surpassed any expectations I’d had for the site when I started it. You can see how things developed from there in this screenshot of my monthly stats, which shows everything from 2014 all the way up to this month:

As you can see, over the years the numbers have continued to rise, largely driven by my coverage of Black Library fiction (a niche within a niche, really), although it certainly hasn’t always been an upwards trajectory on a month by month basis. Why am I showing you these stats? Well, I just thought it might be interesting to see the way in which things have progressed over time. There’s a lot of context to consider if you wanted the whole picture (the number of new posts each month/year, some posts which have been particularly popular, that sort of thing), but even from this level of detail you can see that this journey has definitely been a gradual one. Here’s what that looks like from a yearly perspective:

Don’t ask why this starts in 2013 – I’ve no idea. WordPress being weird, I guess.

So that million views has come over the course of nine years, over more than 1.6 million words across 1,778 posts – like I said, a lot of work. It’s not easy being a reviewer and a blogger, and sometimes it’s disheartening or disappointing or just a total pain in the backside…but it’s also pretty fun, and worth the time and effort. I don’t have any insightful final observation really, or any overall point other than to say keep going if you’re a blogger yourself – it’s worth it – and to say a huge thanks again to everyone who’s visited Track of Words over the years. I’m not sure 2 million views is realistic, but only time will tell what comes next!

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