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As Christmas ends and the New Year looms, everyone inevitably begins to think about things like resolutions and reviews of past deeds. My intention in this post is to look at this blog and consider what has been successful in the past year.

The Ten Most popular posts

[News From the Spirit World] Vampires More stats 488
[AW Blog Chain] Zompocalypse More stats 385
The Avengers UK: Crossover universes More stats 198
A day in the life of a Fantasy Photostudio More stats 155
About More stats 130
Teaching: Behaviour management on BBC Breakfast More stats 108
[AW blog chain] Otherworldly More stats 97
Photoshoot II: Attack of the texting Zombies (with Romans) More stats 91
[AW Blog chain] Rainy Days More stats 85
Weird Worlds [AW Blog chain for June] More stats 82

This table shows the most popular posts for the year. I have excluded the most popular post (at over 2,800 views) because that was ‘homepage/archive’ which basically means that someone viewed the first page. It is interesting that the most popular post this year was one I did as a link to News From the Spirit World for an article I wrote on Vampires. I am guessing that this is due to the overall popularity of Vampires in general. Many of the Absolute Write blog chain posts are also trending in this list which implies that the link from the other blogs in the chain is achieving something. Finally, the Avengers Crossover post and the various Photoshoot posts are perennial favourites that seem to pop up every now and again even months after being posted. Oh, and my ego feels quite pleased that people feel it necessary to view my about page…

Ten Most popular keywords

vampires 280
zombie 98
vampirler 29
avengers meme 17
writer 13
weird worlds 12
zombie lady 12
behaviour management 9
the chosen book review 9
vampire 9

There have been a number of weird and wonderful keywords used over the time this blog has been active. This table shows the most popular ones used. I am sure no one is at all surprised that Vampires come up top, especially given the result of ‘most popular post’. There are also a few variants on that – vampires and vampirler showing up a few times.  Zombie is also a search term which again shows up frequently with a couple of variants – zombie lady being the one shown here. Finally, it is probably no surprise given the popularity of that franchise that the Avengers shows up as the most popular after Vampires and Zombies in this table. The numbers here are obviously less than those for the most popular post because search terms are by their nature more variable.

This table does not show some of the weirdest search terms used to find this blog because most of those were one offs… ‘Cute Zombie Girl’ and ‘Hot Sexy Zombie’ both came up 3 times (with other variants in there as well), ‘Ninfa Goddess’ another 3 times (though I am not convinced it was not Ninfa herself doing this search out of ego…) and ‘discipline suit’ came up twice. No idea what a ‘discipline suit’ is but I am assuming that search led them to my tirade about behaviour management… There was also a weird one ‘benedict cumberbatch as lascelles’ which I assume must have been someone searching for information about the upcoming Strange and Norrell adaptation in which I think Mr Cumberbatch would indeed make a great Lascelles though I have no idea if he has been cast or not (or if anyone has been cast in this particular adaptation…).If anyone hears about any casting news for Strange and Norrell, please feel free to let me know.

Top Ten Countries Viewing the Blog

United Kingdom 1,971
United States FlagUnited States 1,968
Canada FlagCanada 308
Australia FlagAustralia 228
India FlagIndia 91
Philippines FlagPhilippines 73
Germany FlagGermany 68
Puerto Rico FlagPuerto Rico 52
France FlagFrance 51
Indonesia FlagIndonesia 49

Naturally, UK and US dominate this chart in the top two positions here with my fans in both countries vying for top spot and ending with a very close call (only three views in it in the end). This obviously comes from me being British and my books being largely published in the US. I also have a good mix of people from both countries on my facebook and twitter accounts (both of which get links to here posted) and a lot of US people come to me through the Absolute Write forums. Australia and Canada are on here for similar reasons – Australia due to the many fans of Rebekah Harrington and Canada due to Skyla Dawn Cameron and Judy Bagshaw’s occasional posts on this blog. It is also nice to see other countries on here to give the place a proper international feel with places such as the Philippines and Indonesia showing up there.

So, that is a brief overview of the state of this blog as the year comes to a close. I’ve found some interesting trends here and hope to find many more in 2013 when I repeat this process again. Of course, this year has been good for a few other things. In this year I managed to get involved in the creation of an entire world background for a fantasy wargame called Realm (today is your last chance to enter the competition to win some miniatures…) and also to finally release Transitions onto an unsuspecting public after many many years in ‘publication hell’. I’ve also managed to organise two successful photoshoots by bringing different people with different exceptional talents together then sitting back and watching them work magic.

In 2013 I have other plans afoot and hope to be able to announce other fun things very soon…