Armed with the stats from five months of this blog, I’m now in a position to answer this question. It may surprise you, it certainly surprised me. My witterings about the writing process didn’t get many hits. What scored high were posts about other writers, about key writing events, about dealing with the pain of rejection, and about technical tips and tools.

Technical tips and tools ranked high. The post about Scenes, Sequels and MRUs ) ranked first as the most frequently read, and the one about writing and editing tools  ranked fifth. These two have proved the most durable, receiving reads in every month since they were posted. It’s not totally clear why the first of these has been so popular. Perhaps it’s a combination of two things. It’s the only post in which I work through an example of applying the technique to a piece of my own writing. And also if you happen to google the string “scenes, sequels and MRUs” it comes up on the first page.

The second most popular post was my thankyou to other writers who had helped me – The Kindness of Other Writers . I guess that makes sense. People like reading about themselves, and they tell their friends. The lifetime of this post was short.

Events were also popular. The posts about the Winchester Writers’ Festival  and the Costa Short Story Competition ranked third and sixth respectively. Understandably, these posts had very short lifetimes too.

Emotion ranked fourth, with the post about dealing with rejection. This one was quite durable. It was read more times in July, then when it was first posted in May. My only other post about rejection ranked tenth.

I’ve never tried including any excerpts from my writing, so I don’t know how interesting this would be to readers.

The lessons I take away from this, in thinking about the next phase of this blog are:

• Write more about other people. I have already begun adding occasional interviews with authors
• Continue to review writing tools
• Cover major literary events
• Experiment with including excerpts from my writing

And of course, I’ll continue to blog about whatever I’m thinking about that week, otherwise it’s no fun for me.

I’d be really interested to hear from other authors about what works on your blog, and about what you’d like to see more of on this blog.