Yearly Roundup: 2020 in Numbers

Another year gone by (and what a weird year it’s been), and it’s time once more to take a look back at another year of running Track of Words – my seventh year! I’m going to follow the pattern I started last year, of splitting things across several articles, starting with a look at some of the numbers for 2020 pulled from my website’s stats. I’ll take a look at the overall visitor numbers and give a quick breakdown of the content I published in 2020, then finish off with the most popular articles (across a few categories) on Track of Words over the last year. All being well, I’ll then take a look in a couple of separate articles at some specific highlights, referring back to the goals I set for 2020, and look ahead to what 2021 might hold.

A bit of context

After putting a crazy amount of effort into Track of Words in 2018 (348 articles and over 310k words) I toned things down a bit in 2019, and deliberately set out to do the same again in 2020. Spending all my free time reading and writing is fun and all, but it’s exhausting at times, so it’s important to find a good balance – I feel like I’m still working on finding that, but I’m getting there. To help with things this year, I decided that I would aim for a pretty solid four or five articles a week (i.e. 200-260 ish for the year), but be happy to take proper breaks if I needed them, and also to cut down on how many Black Library books I read so that I could enjoy reading a bit more widely than before.

With that in mind, I hoped that I would be able to really enjoy working on Track of Words in 2020 and share that enjoyment with other readers and reviewers, but at the same time I knew that I wasn’t likely to see anything like the year-on-year growth that the site has had in previous years. When I wrote my 2020 Goals article back in last January I tentatively hoped for something in the region of 25% growth (in terms of page views) compared to 2019, but I quickly recognised that was unlikely, which was quite liberating actually – I could just work on what I was interested in and make sure I was enjoying it, without fretting about how popular each piece of content was. In the end, I’m actually delighted with how popular Track of Words has been in 2020; here’s a couple of overall figures:

• Page views: approximately 177k (an increase of 1% over 2019)
• Site visitors: approximately 86K (an increase of 14% over 2019)

It still blows my mind that so many people want to read things that I’ve written – 177k page views is amazing, for my little one-man website. Seeing the page views hold steady from 2019 feels like quite an achievement all things considered, and the actual number of visitors going up by over 10k is fantastic! I’m so grateful to everyone who visits and engages with me here.

Article numbers

I always enjoy looking back at a year’s worth of site stats and digging into some of the numbers, so let’s start off with my productivity figures.

• Total number of articles: 230 (21 fewer than 2019)
• Total number of words: 260,068 (11.7k more than 2019)

As I said earlier, my aim was for somewhere in the region of 200-260 articles, and I ended up slap bang in the middle of that figure! It’s certainly not been a quiet year in terms of reading and writing (I also read 130 books), but it’s been manageable…even if somehow I ended up writing more words than 2019 despite the fewer articles.

Let’s break things down a little further, splitting articles out by type. Of those 230 articles…

• 119 reviews, of which:
  • 70 book reviews
  • 48 short story reviews
  • 1 audio drama review
• 66 interviews, of which:
  • 56 Rapid Fire interviews
  • 4 Writing for Black Library interviews
  • 3 Author Spotlight interviews
  • 2 epic ‘Gotrek Through the Ages’ interviews
  • 1 Self Publishing Spotlight interview
• 45 blog articles, of which:
  • 12 Monthly Roundups
  • 9 ‘Where to Start’ articles (8 for Black Library series)
  • 4 Top/Best Of 2020 articles
  • 20 assorted articles

119 reviews might sound like a lot, but that’s 46 fewer than last year – I ended up reviewing more books, but considerably fewer short stories and only a single audio drama! I definitely need to listen to more audios in 2021 (especially as ‘listen to more audio dramas’ was one of my goals for 2020 – oops!), and we’ll see what happens in terms of short stories. All told though, I’m pretty happy with those numbers, especially with all the interviews – more than one a week – and blog articles that I managed this year. Hopefully I can keep working on similar content for 2021.

Top posts

Next let’s take a look at the most popular posts of 2020, split out into book reviews, quick reviews (i.e. short stories), author interviews and general blog articles. This is always fun to look at, as there are inevitably a few surprises. This year I’ve decided to include the number of page views for each post, so you can see how popular they are in relation to each other – I think it’s very interesting to see how they pan out!

Book reviews:

1. Saturnine by Dan Abnett (728 views)
2. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade by Dan Abnett (663)
3. The First Wall by Gav Thorpe (617)
4. Scions of the Emperor – a Horus Heresy Primarchs Anthology (550)
5. Tales from the Loop by Simon Stålenhag (441)

No real surprise in Saturnine being top of the list, but I’m delighted to see Tales from the Loop on there – it’s such a fantastic book! Scions of the Emperor was my most popular book review in 2019, so it’s interesting to see it still proving popular.

Quick reviews:

1. The Death of Uriel Ventris by Graham McNeill (1,070 views)
2. Unification by Chris Wraight (453)
3. The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex by Tamsyn Muir (418)
4. The Walker in Fire by Peter Fehervari (332)
5. Nightbleed by Peter Fehervari (318)

Some unexpected numbers here with The Death of Uriel Ventris proving more popular than any of my full-length book reviews, a surprise entry for The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex (what a title!), and my 2016 review of The Walker in Fire still generating interest. I’m so pleased to see two Peter Fehervari stories in the top 5!

Interviews:

1. RAPID FIRE: Dan Abnett Talks Anarch (2,716 views)
2. RAPID FIRE: Dan Abnett Talks Saturnine (1,984)
3. Nounslayer: Gotrek Through the Ages (Part 1) with William King, Nathan Long, David Guymer and Darius Hinks (1,893)
4. Peter Fehervari Talks Requiem Infernal and the Dark Coil (1,270)
5. Danie Ware Talks Sisters of Battle and Women in 40k (1,183)

I was expecting Dan Abnett’s Saturnine interview to be near the top of this list, but it’s interesting to see his Anarch interview still proving popular too (it’s passed 5.6k views in total). I couldn’t be more pleased to see how well my multi-author ‘Nounslayer’ interview has gone down (that took loads of work, and I’m really happy with how it came out), and likewise my in-depth interviews with Peter Fehervari and Danie Ware. Very happy to see them doing so well.

Articles:

1. Keep Track of Upcoming Black Library Releases (6,800 page views)
2. Getting Started With Black Library – Age of Sigmar (6,246)
3. Black Library: ‘New 40k’ Reading List (4,955)
4. Getting Started With Black Library – Warhammer 40,000 (1,977)
5. A Traveller’s Guide to Peter Fehervari’s Dark Coil (1,761)

It’s interesting to see just how much more popular these articles are compared to my book reviews! On the one hand it’s frustrating because I really agonise over reviews and take ages with them, but on the other hand I’m very happy that readers are finding these articles helpful and interesting. That being said, when it comes to all these Black Library-related articles I continue to be disappointed that it takes someone like me to put these together, and BL themselves don’t seem interested in creating helpful resources for their fans! Ah well.

As an aside, isn’t it interesting that of my ‘Getting Started’ articles it’s the Age of Sigmar one that’s the most popular? It was the most popular post of all in 2019, and was only surpassed in 2020 by my regularly-updated spreadsheet up upcoming BL releases! Considering the disparity in BL’s release schedule between 40k and AoS (roughly speaking I’d say it’s about 4:1 in favour of 40k), there’s clearly plenty of demand from the fans for Age of Sigmar fiction. Sure, this isn’t exactly the most scientific of methods, but still…

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So that’s it, 2021 is here and if you’ve read this far then you’ve seen all (I think) the important numbers relating to Track of Words in 2020. I’ll hopefully sort out at least one further article looking back at 2020 and/or ahead to 2021, but until then all that remains is to say thank you once again to everyone last year who checked out Track of Words, left a comment, got in touch on social media or via email, and generously tipped to help me keep all of this going. It’s been a tough one, but here’s to a much better 2021!

Was there a particular Track of Words article – whether a review, interview or blog post – that you enjoyed the most in 2020? Is there anything you’d love to see from Track of Words in 2021? If so, I’d love to hear from you – get in touch in the comments below, or come find me on Twitter.

If you’d like to support Track of Words and help me to keep working on new content, you can leave me a tip over on my Ko-Fi page.