Some Notes on Stats and Search Terms

Ever since some poor soul linked to me on tumblr, I’ve been getting traffic to one of the posts on the Chimney that is honestly not my favorite, not related to my genre, and I think it kinda just sucked a little bit.

Here’s the top five posts over the life of the blog:

1. How to Create a Believable Magic System

2. Common Magic System Pros and Cons: Elemental Magic

3. Magical No-Nos

4. Rules for Being a Bitch

5. Meeting Your Goals for Magic

 

I bet you can’t guess which post I’m referring to…

And it has almost twice as many views as the post just beneath it.  Tumblr, why you do me like this?

 

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the traffic.  And shit, I got linked to in a list of resources with posts from Janice Hardy.  I mean, holy crap she is awesome, you should go check her out if you haven’t before.  Like, how could that post put me on the same level as a published author?

The vagaries of the internet, I guess.  Apparently several different writing blogs on tumblr stumbled across it at the same time and found something they liked.

I just… I wish I could predict these things, and then maybe my traffic could compare to Janice hardy et all as well.

 

My Affair With the Authosphere

I took a break from reading and writing blog posts this year.  Not on purpose.  Just a confluence of events that lead me to not log into my GoogleReader and thus not be up on current trnds enough to post anything of my own.

Now that it’s summer and school is out of the way, I figured I’d get back into it.  And I’ve learned something.  Something very interesting, but also a bit disappointing: As an unpublished writer in the authosphere, the period between becoming involved and having learned what you can learn is very short.  It’s the honeymoon phase of being a blog reader.  Everything is new and wonderful, and you can’t get enough.   There’s always something else to discover.

Right after my discovery of the writerly blog community, I went crazy.  I searched all over the web, followed all the links I could find, read every post.  And for two years, there was plenty to keep me going.  But towards the end of that period, I began to find that very few of the new posts on my favorite blogs were really relevant to me.  All the things about reading blogs I had once enjoyed now felt tawdry and dull.  I had seen it all before.

I was beyond the point where blogs could be a useful resource to me purely as a writer.  There was still plenty of scandal and gossip to entertain me, still reasons enough to hang around, looking at old photos, reliving a few of the best memories.  But it wasn’t enough to hold me there.  After our little break-up, I would occasionally log into my reader, scroll through a few posts when I had nothing else to do.  Once or twice I even spent a few days going through every unread post.  But then I would get bored again, and move on to some other, more exciting activity.

And now coming back after more than a year of not reading blogs and articles and writing sites, I find that that still holds true.  I tend to scroll past most posts, every now and then opening something interesting in a new tab.  But not too many new tabs, because the information isn’t all that new to me anymore.  I’ve seen the same posts a hundred times before.

But I want that feeling back.  I enjoyed tearing through entire new blogs in a day or two, learning a secret with every scroll.  And there’s still stuff I want to learn about, approach in greater depth.  But blogs are a somewhat shallow medium.  There’s only so much discussion you can have, at least with other people’s blogs.  I often feel a bit weird responding with what are essentially entire blogs posts of my own.

For that reason, I hope to be much more active here at the Chimney, but I know it’s going to be rough going.  Because one of the primary ways to encourage discussion on your own blog is to contribute to the discussion on someone else’s.  And yet I feel like I wasted all my energy for such discussions, and now I find it very hard to come up with anything constructive, because you can only have the same discussion so many times before you have nothing left to say.

I’m a bit curious as to the turnover rate on blog readers.  Being back now, I see many of the same commentors on the various blogs I follow that I saw when I first discovered those blogs.  I wonder how they’ve managed to stay engaged.  Maybe they don’t follow as many blogs as I did.  Maybe they stick to one or two, or have other activities and interests that limit their time in the blogosphere.  Maybe these topics that I find so passe are still fresh to them.  If so, I envy them their interest.  I wish I knew where mine has gone.

 

Links Rock

I love linking to people, and I love getting linked to.  Pageviews are cool, comments are awesome, but what really makes me feel validated is when other bloggers link to the Chimney.  Not just because it drives tons of traffic to my blog, but because someone else who feels the need to speak about something feels the need to point other people to my site.  They found it useful, useful enough that they want others to see it, too.  And, aside from inflating my ego and pretending I am more important than I really am, the main reason I started this blog was because I wanted to help people improve their writing.  There’s so much variety of good writing out there, but we can always use more.  I do have a big ego, but I don’t assume that anything I say will automatically be useful to someone, and so when a link comes in, saying “Your stuff was useful to me and I think it will be useful to others”, that really improves my mood.  As you may have guessed from the last post, I’ve been ina pretty bad mood lately, and so when I popped in to check my stats and saw I was getting linkage from a blog I have never heard of before–and round-up linkage, at that–it really perked me up.  Thanks, Fuzzy Mango. You really made my day.

 

Raging Reader Round-up (08/05/11)

Maybe I should just officially change the date for this to Sunday. XD

1.  Is responding to a review ever a good idea?

2.  Are you happy when you’re not writing?

3.  Epic Fantasy is what?

4.  Things You Should Learn From Writing

5.  How Selling a Book Really Is

6.  FanFic is fun, whether you’re writing it or arguing about it.

7.  How Good Writing Can Still Make a Bad Book

8.  Starting a Book?  It Might Help to Know the Endgame

9.  Your Agent Rocks, but She Isn’t Wonder Woman

10.  If I Had a Jam Jar as Big as #8, I’d probably go ahead and fill a swimming pool with jam.

11.  If you wanna get a record deal, you gotta do coke.

12.  Distractions, baby.  I love ‘em.

13.  How Do You Feel the World?

14.  Writers and readers are characters, too.  Don’t let anyone tell you they aren’t.

15.  Why One Character is Never Enough

16.  Revise, Rinse, and Repeat

17.  Good descriptions, but I’ve never been a fan of mixing genres and age categories.

18.  Samuel’s Real Skinny on Self-Publishing

19.  A Path to Publishing with Bookends, LLC

20.  Life doesn’t happen to us, we happen to life.  And it isn’t always pretty.

21.  Sex, Genetic Determinism, and James Tiptree Jr

22.  Men read romance, too.  Considering her blog, I’m considering buying this book.  Internet marketing works, people.

23.  If only SFF authors wrote posts like this, they would sell a lot more books.

24.  Still don’t like it.

25.  I love my state.

26.  More bullshit about social networking.

27.  Literary writing is still literary.

28.  Young authors are great, and I’d love to see more.  But old folks still got game.

29.  Chick lit is still lit people.  Deal with it.

30.  How long will books and movies stay on their own sides of the line?  Alternate endings are…?

31.  Inciting incidents and authorial experience.  Do established authors get more slack?  Do they deserve to?

32.  Can you be a dummy and write YA?  That’s what the title of a book by this lovely lady says.

33.  Writing Tips from a Dark Future.

34.  Short Story Submission

35.  A link to a list of Marketing Links I stole from Sierra Godfrey.

36.  Short stories are not novels, Mr. Martin.  But otherwise good advice.

37.  Other authors are awesome, but you are, too.

38.  Never say that hard work doesn’t get you anywhere.

39.  Push some paper, publishers.  We know you can do it.

I never set out to be an aggregator blog, but it’s almost all I can do to keep up with these round-ups in-between the cracks of “real life.”  That will change eventually, I hope, once my schedule settles down.  Hope y’all find this links useful in the mean-time.

 

Raging Reader Round-up Part 2 (07/29/11)

17.  What You Can Learn from the Submissions Process

18.  You Can Get Back in the Game

19.  Cons, Panels, and Big Names vs. You

20.  How Not To Prop an Agent

21.  What Readers Want/What Blog Readers Want.  Reaching A Broader Blog Audience.  Why Writing Blogs Don’t Help Writers, or do they?

22.  I don’t know if pets are people, too; but we can certainly learn people-related lessons from them.

23.  People-watching ans Story Inspiration

24.  More on Self-publishing.  And more.

25.  More on the Digital Transformation

26.  How To Handle a Critique

27.  Writers are Hypochondriacs

28.  Conlangs are one of my favorite topics.  For a long time, I’ve considered building a language on the blog, posting once a week.  Unfortunately, the incredibly awesome Chris Doty over on the Clarion Foundation blog beat me to it.

29.  Jim Butcher on Writing over at Clarion Foundation

32.  Selling Books is Not a Bonus

33.  I have a book problem.  Thankfully, I am not alone.

34.  Social media has become a powerful force.  Even anonymous social media.  Like FML.  Or LikeALittle, which allows users to flirt anonymously.  Own your flirts, people.  Or better yet, just walk up to him and say something!

35.  Maintaining Tension Makes Better Books

36.  Contemporary Fiction is Not Boring

37.  How To Keep Your Short Stories Short by Lydia Sharp

38.  Unfinished Manuscripts Can Be Avoided

39.  Plotting, Pansting, and Writing Rituals

40.  Fast Writing and Writing Software

41.  What Do Yoour Books Say About You?

42.  More on Branding

43.  I’ve resisted using writing software for so long.  I’ve tried a few programs, and they always seemed more stifling than supportive.  But I keep hearing authors singing the praises of Scrivener.  I might have to give it a shot.

44.  More Agents As Publishers  Something I’m still on the fence about, assuming there are safeguards involved.

45.  Murphy’s Law of Agenting

46.  Anecdotes aren’t evidence, and reviews aren’t sales.

47.  Genres are descriptions.

48.  Emotional Truth in Fiction

49.  Giving Your Reader a Happy Ending

50.  Five Ways to Improve Your Writing with Janice Hardy

51.  How To Keep Up Online.  Ironically, it mentions the value of round-up posts.

52.  Choosing Narrative Distance

53.  What Juliette Wade Looks For in Critique Partners

54.  Making Your Characters Cry Is Not Enough

55.  Start With A World or Start With A Story?

56.  Levels of Revision

Whenever I’ve read blogging round-ups in the past, they’ve always been relatively short.  Maybe 15 or 20 links at the most.  When I look at my two round-up posts, 32 and 56 links respectively, I can’t understand why there’s such a difference.  I’ve mentioned before that I read a lot of posts a week.  Usually 200 or more.  That’s from about 30 or 40 blogs.  Which means about 4-5 posts a week on average.  In fact, you’ll notice if you go to all the links that I’ve linked to several blogs multiple times.  Because I have a bit of layman’s OCD, I read every single one of these posts.  I also do it because each of these blogs offers me something I can’t get from any of the other blogs I read.

And there are many more blogs out there that I don’t read.  But I assume many of them are blogs that could provide their own value to me.  I don’t think anyone will disagree that there’s a glut of blogs out there.  There are probably more blogs that could provide value to a person than they could keep up with reading 24/7.    But are bloggers overloading their blogs with content?  Many blog readers are loyal, meaning they read posts even if they don’t end up giving value.  Does this do a disservice to blog readers?  Could cutting down on the posts actually increase page views by giving readers more time to read a variety of blogs?  And finally, should a blogger be selfish and do whatever they can to increase their own pageviews, or is there a benefit to directiing some of that traffic somewhere else?

 

Raging Reader Round-up Part 1 (07/29/11)

I’m late, I know it!  But stuff was going down IRL.  Like arm issues that are still making large amounts of typing a bit painful.  So, here’s my belated round-up for last week:

1.  Not sure they put enough sugar in this lemonade.

2.  Still not sure about this whole agent as publisher thing, but at least the Knight Agency seems to have some safeguards in place.

3.  Fear is the mindkiller.

4.  Prologues, Again

5.  How to Break into Reading Fantasy

6.  Everything you have ever read in an “edgy” YA book is just the tip of the iceberg.

7.  Being a published poet is hard.

8.  Follow the rules.  Writing is work.  You wouldn’t ignore the rules to apply for a scholarship or a research grant, why should queries be any different?

9.  How to Build a Villain by Jim Butcher

10.  Writing speed matters.  Writing is like a raffle.  The more entries you have in the hat, the better chance you’ll win the prize–in this case a fan of your work rather than a one-time reader.  And here’s how you can max out your wordcount.

11.  You Can’t Always Be the Star.

12.  A In this day and age, writers are often told they need a website, a blog, a twitter, a facebook, anything to connect to fans and find new readers.  But a lot of people aren’t seeing this for what it really is.  As an author, you are a product line, and like any product, you need to establish your brand.  If you start out writing Paranormal Romances, and seven books in you throw in a near-future syberpunk novel, it’s going to confuse your reader base.  Everything you do contributes to your brand, so make sure you keep on top of how it will affect your career.

13.  Nobody knows the numbers you need.

14.  Reading this article makes me realize I am screwed.  I love to write about future generations on the same world.  Damn.

15.  Notes on Writing

16.  Have You Met Your Blogging Goals?

There are only seventeen links here.  Why?  Because 211 posts to read through this week, with these sixteen being culled from the first 100.  Part 2 will be up tomorrow, likely with 16 more links from the second hundred posts.  There’s a reason for the ragin’.

 

Raging Reader Round-up (7/22/2011)

Because having to read 100 posts in a week to pick out the gems makes me rage.  But now you won’t have to.

1. I wish I was a Lannister.

2. You have a million excuses.

3. You remember that awesome post I did on where writers get our ideas?  Well, it was a lie.  We really steal them from teenagers on the bus.

4.  You know that theory about how every choice we make creates a branch in the timeline?  Well, it would certainly explain all the contradictory posts about the future of publishing.

5. Neil Gaiman’s Guide to Writing

6. If you don’t love agents, they won’t love you.

7. Bad Pick-up Lines for Snagging an Agent.  And worse ones.  Also, drunken beagles?

8. Alien planets are great.  But how ’bout something a little more exotic?

9. Why you might not wanna leave a drawer full of crap for relatives to find.

10. Don’t trust the word “average” in publishing too much…

11. Even being a published writer these days can suck.  Especially if your agent thinks they should be your publisher, too.  That’ll probably look something like this.  At least not everyone is doing it.  And agents and editors are out to get you, or at least, the people they work for are.  That said, if you do get an editor, you can be pretty sure they love your book.    Of course, even if your publisher is still your publisher, you might find your contract amended automatically by e-mail.  And it’s more than one publisher.  Which might be good or bad for you as an individual, but says a lot about how well publishers are treating their authors.  Not much of it good. The book industry is in more trouble than you though, huh?  And the booksellers are in worse.   But we can save it!

12. The above links talk a lot about how writers should know the business side as well.  Tawna Fenske prefers not to.  What about you?

13.  The first week of sales matters.  You probably knew that.  Did you this?

14. Is your character boring?  Passive?  Perhaps even a bit wimpy?  That’s okay.  YA Historical Fiction author Katy Longshore has devised an 8-Step Program for Crappy Characters.  You can save everybody.

15.  Motivation is important.  But just how obvious should you be about it?  Janice Hardy has some suggestions.

16.  Establishing your character’s, er… character, is very important.  But studies show that circumstances can have a much more powerful effect on behavior than your underlying personality.  Janice Hardy has some tips on how to incorporate this into your stories.

17. The Intern (is she really an intern, still?) dissects a book that readers couldn’t put down:  Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  And goes on to explain how it’s like a video game, and why that makes it so appealing.  Being a gamer myself, I have to agree with most of her analysis.

18. The first thirty pages of your novel are probably boring.  Cut ‘em.

19. What to do when an agent says no to your new project

20. How to Manage Your TIme as a Writer by Mindy Klasky.

21.  When you’re a fantas or science fiction writer, you often deal with world-building, and creating new cultures.  One way to make this easier is to learn ore about cultures on Earth.  Here are some interesting stories from Juliette Wade.

22. An interesting discussion on the origins of various cultural structures and metaphors courtesy of Google + Hangouts.

23. How cosplaying can teach us about world-building.  You know who you can ask about various types of clothing in different historical periods, or just about clothing in general?  Cosplayers.  Just because they may happen to be dressed up as pichu in high heels, that doesn’t mean they won’t know how to cut a Japanese yukata, or how to sew a Fauntleroy suit.  The take-away:  Even the craziest hobbies have unexpected value.

24. Is language completely arbitrary?  Many studies say not.  And you can use that in your writing and your world-building.

25. On the construction of story endings and tying shit up.

26.  On hooking.  Because all the best writers are doing it.

27.  Kids are the future, and they know it.  So how come you don’t hear about it much in YA?

28.  Lots of cons and conferences tout manuscript evaluations as a feature.  John Gilstrap over at The Kill Zone give us his Ten Rules for Manuscript Evaluation and how to get the most out of it.

29.  Meg Gardiner on drafting a novel.  No lie, brainstorming is the best part.  Writing the thing out is… somewhere in the top 10.

30.  Kathleen Pickering on on-site reasearch.

31.  What typos cost you. Courtesy of the NYT.

32. Three Ways to Publish from Anne R. Allen.  Of course, there are more than three ways to publish.  Plenty of folks are successful with web serializations.  I’m gonna be publishing a manga a page at a time on Deviant Art.  But Anne does tackle the three main methods of publishing a book-length work.

33. Jennifer Archer on selling her debut novel. Three times.

34.  Genre vs. Literary: Why the hate?  Thanks, Roni.

35. Best-selling vs. Best-writing from Meghan Ward.

36. Making Old Thoughts New Again

You know how I mentioned I read over 100 posts this week?  That was a lie.  That’s just the number in my blog reader.  But blogs love to link, and I can’t help but follow.  It was really something like 200.  Which may explain my lack of novel-writing this week. XD

So why only 36 points?  Well, keep in mind that some of them had more than 1 post.  And some of the posts just weren’t worth passing on.  Just be glad I read those ones for you.

 

The Evils of Blogging Round-ups

One of the more popular blog posts recently has been the round-up.  There are all these great articles out there, so why not link to them on our blogs, for our readers reading pleasure?

There are in fact sites and blogs entirely devoted to this sort of passing on of value.  And they’re very useful.

But when I see this kind of post on a blog I’ve been following, which used to be 100% original content, it makes me rage.  Like, that sneaky, cheating bastard in a cloak head-shitted me while I was grabbing a soda rage.  If you’ve ever played an fps, you’ll know what I mean.

But why do I rage?  Because, I am terminally behind on my blog reading.  I’m always distracted or having to switch between email accounts (thanks Uni) to get to my reader.  In fact, yesterday, I had 444 blogs posts from 30-odd sites waiting for me.  And I went to one of my favorite blogs, and half the posts were round-ups, with another 20 or so links for me to read.

And because I am a little bit OCD that way, I spent five hours reading all of them.  And I found some great posts, and added some awesome new blogs to my reader.  But I was still raging.

And so, as turn-about is fair play, I will attempt, despite my terrible organozational skills, to begin my own Round-up posts every Friday–which seems to be the most popular day.  And I will find such awesome, under-the-radar material, that you will never be able to skip them.  Because I love you, and I want you to feel the way I do.

And also because it’s a really easy way to fill up a post with content, and I am lazy and over-worked.

Happy Raging, Readers.

Your Bestest Pal,
Atsiko

 

Reading Outside Your Genre: Blogs

One of the most common pieces of advice that I hear from writers is to read outside of your genre.  In fact, some writers go so far as not reading anything inside their genre while they are writing.  Which I think is taking things a bit far, but…  The point is, it’s very good advice.

Why?  Here’s another piece of advice I hear all the time:  “Even if your story is has almost exactly the same topic/characters/theme/plot as someone else’s, it will still be different.  Put your own spin on it.”  Again, a fantastic piece of advice.  But how do you do it?  One way to get ideas is by following our first piece of advice.  Every genre has its own tropes and conventions, things that are common amongst the majority of stories in that genre.  But some of the best work in any genre involves tropes and conventions that aren’t normally a part of it.  And you won’t know what those are if you only read inside your own genre.

Blogging is a lot like writing.  There are tons of blogs out there, about almost every topic you can think of.  So how do you make your own blog stand out?  Here’s My 5 Step Plan to Writing a Rocking Blog:

1.  Identify the goals of your blog.  Who is your target audience?  What are you trying to tell them?  What methods will you use?  What style will you write in?  What is your blog’s genre?

2.  Look at other blogs in the same genre.  How do they approach their readers?  What tips and tricks do they use?  What formatting do they employ?  What are the most common templates for blog posts?  How-tos?  In-depth analysis?  Anecdotes?  What style do they adopt?

3.  Decide how to satsify your target readers.  How can you use what you’ve learned reading other blogs to create a blog that people will want to read?  What have those other blogs done right?  What have they done wrong?  Which of their techniques can you make work for you?

4.  Now read blogs that aren’t in your genre.  What kinds of things don’t your genre’s blogs talk about?  What else do you find interesting besides the standard fare of your genre?  What blogs grabbed your attention?  What techniques did those other bloggers use that made you want to keep reading?  How could these bloggers maintain your interest in topics you had never been interested in before?

5.  Apply what you’ve learned.  What do you see on blogs in other genres that could be adapted to your own blog?  What things in those other blogs could apply to blogs in general?  What topics did you come across that were relevant to your own genre, but rarely addressed?  What did you find that could make your blog stand out?  What will be your twist?

Of course, digging through hundreds and thousands of off-topic blogs is tough.  There has to be a way to narrow down your search.

And you can find it right here on the Chimney.  As a special service just for my readers, I’m going to point you to some of the out-genre blogs that I use to keep my perspective wide.

Tune in every Saturday, when I will write a post featuring a blog outside of my own genre, and why I read it.  I will explore what makes it such a fantastic blog in its own right, and why it is relevant to those of you who may be reading my blog, even if you don’t share a genre with me.

Keep in mind that I am first a spec fic writer and reader, then a fiction reader.  I will be looking at blogs that mostly apply first and foremost to writers, because that’s what I am, and its also my target audience.

So the chances that I will be high-lighting sports blogs; or that if you run a site on how to buy and use a gas grill the blogs I feature will give added value to your site are slim.

But they could!  The whole point of me writing this post was that you never know what could attract readers.

Hopefully, this feature series will kick off Saturday, July 23.  I’ll be plugging it wherever I reasonably can.  Please feel free to mention it to your friends, fellow bloggers, and also your readers.  If you have a blog you think should be featured, or if you like to submit your own blog, don’t hesitate to e-mail me.  You’ll find my contact details on my Contact Me page, in the menu at the top of the page.

I’m also going to put this out on my Twitter, so feel free to Re-Tweet (and follow me if you aren’t already) if the mood strikes you.  There are tons of awesome blogs out there that you should be reading, and I’m going to do my best to introduce as many of them to you as I can.

Because I’m curious about how well people police their identities on the internet, I’m going to wait until six hours before the each post go online to notify the bloggers in question.

(Pro Tip:  Setting up Google Alerts and other services to keep track of how your name is mentioned on the internet is not egotistical.  It is good social net-working practice and it can not only improve your relationship with others by making you aware of their interest in you, it can help nip problems in the bud.)

Now, she doesn’t know it yet, but I’ve already selected Romantic Comedy author Tawna Fenske at Don’t pet me, I’m writing to be the first featured blog.  It was in fact one of her posts that inspired this series, because she is just that awesome.  Don’t wait for the post, go follow her immediately!  And feel free to tell her who sent you.

 

My New Blog Addiction

I haven’t posted in awhile, mostly because I’ve been busy with school, but I’ve been being very introspective over this last week of midterm break, and I realized something:

I haven’t checked my blog reader in a long time.  This is partially because my school insists on me using a google mail account for the school mail system, which means I have to switch backl and forth between my school and personal accounts whenever I want to read my e-mail or check my reader.

But there’s something else involved:  I have twenty or thirty blogs on my reader, and many of them post several times a week.  Many also link off to tons of other interesting blogs.  Keeping up with that many blog posts is tough, and there’s not always a ton of percieved benefit on my part.  Several small checks of blogs is much more time-consuming than one big one.

It’s kind of like how I watch anime.  When I’m watching several airing shows, I start out watching them as soon as a new epsiode is released.  But, after awhile, that becomes a hassle, so I watch several new episodes of various shows all at once.  Many anime fans or fantasy readers will tell you, they prefer watching something all in one big chunck.

And I’ve discovered that  these habits carry over to how I read blogs.  When I stumle across a new and very interesting blog, such as my recent find Experience Points,   I love to plow through that masses of archived posts in one or two big pushes.  It’s so much fun.  But constantly reading one post on many old blogs can be tedious, even if the posts themselves are interesting.

Anybody else ever experienced something similar?