2019: Blogging Year in Review

FAVORITE BOOKS READ IN 2019

See Briana’s list of best books from 2019 by clicking here.

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BLOGGING STATS AND FACTS

• Top 4 Countries for Visitors: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, India (No change from 2018.)
• Top Referrers: Search engines, WordPress reader, Pinterest (Pinterest is new! In 2018, the #3 referrer was Twitter; this year Twitter is #4 by a wide margin.)
• Top Commenters: WordPress no longer seems to provide this information, but thanks to everyone who commented!
• Blog Views: Slightly under 90,000. (This is a decrease was 2018, where we had only 100,000 views. While we saw a large increase in traffic from Pinterest, we seem to have gotten fewer hits from search engines, which made the difference. Traffic from places like the WordPress reader and Twitter did not decline.)

READING STATS AND FACTS

• Oldest Book Briana Read This Year: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
• Longest Book Briana Read: The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty
• Briana’s Pages Read: 33,000+
• Most Read Books: young adult, picture books, middle grade
• Percentage of Briana’s Books from Library: ~30% (This seems low, but I think it’s skewed by the number of books I already own that I read and some other free sources, such as DailyLit, Project Gutenberg, and friends; I certainly didn’t get tons of books from publishers or buy that many! Also I counted library books by adding them to “source: library” shelf on Goodreads, and it’s possible I didn’t add some that I should have. )

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OUR MOST VIEWED POSTS

• Ten Young Adult Books with Male Protagonists
• How to Start a Book Blog
• If You Like Jane Eyre, Then Read….
• Writing Fantasy Dialogue
• Harry Potter Sorting Quiz

Notably, all of these are posts that did well on Pinterest. The Jane Eyre, fantasy dialogue, and book blog posts have done well on search engines in the past, but the other two posts received views solely because I promoted them on Pinterest this year.

Most Viewed Post Published in 2019: 10 Must-Read Books about J.R.R. Tolkien (This was picked up and shared by some influential authors.)

WHAT’S MISSING?

I’ve noticed over the years that this “year in review” post never features what I might consider our “most interesting” or even “most important” posts because, unfortunately, discussion posts don’t get the same amount of views as blogging advice or book lists, even if they’re popular or receive a lot of comments.

For instance, Krysta posted several times this year about the Macmillan e-book embargo and about other issues relevant to libraries, such as whether adults should sit in reserved teen spaces and whether libraries should acknowledge holidays. She also investigated the impact of Little Free Libraries and whether the Macmillan e-book embargo will disproportionately affect women. None of these posts are reflected in the stats presented here.

COMING IN 2020

We’ll be hosting our annual Tolkien Reading Event in March 2020. If you would like to contribute a guest post about Tolkien, his work, or something related (for instance, the Inklings), the sign-up form will be up on our blog in January.