As 2022 comes to a close it’s time for my usual yearly roundup post, where I look back at the last twelve months on Track of Words. It’s strange to think that 2023 will be my 10th year of running this site – I’m still not sure how this went from something to do just to keep me occupied, into something that I’ve committed a huge amount of time to over nearly a decade! Anyway, at the end of the site’s 9th year let’s have a quick look at how things have been going recently. As usual with these posts, I’ll go through some stats for things like number of posts/words and number of page views/site visits, then talk a bit about the goals I set for the year and how I did with those.
Numbers
I try really hard not to fixate on stats, but they do inevitably occupy a fair bit of my thoughts. It’s fun to keep tracks of things though, so let’s look at 2022 in numbers, beginning with my own productivity. Since I peaked in 2018 with a crazy 248 posts I’ve been deliberately slowing down and giving myself less work to do, and in 2022 I published the fewest posts since my first year of running the site in 2014. I’m happy with that though, as I really did need to keep slowing things down.
– Total number of articles: 125 (44 fewer than 2021)
– Total number of words: 204,317 (49.6k fewer than 2021)
For all that I did slow down, that’s still a lot of words in a year (although a fair few of those were contributed by guests, mostly in December), making the equivalent of two decent-length novels! It’s also interesting to note that my average word count per article continues to increase – at over 1.6k words it’s now the highest it’s ever been. That’s partly because of things like long-form author interviews and guest posts, but I’ve definitely also noticed myself struggling to be quite as concise in reviews as I used to be.
Looking at page views next, the trend from last year of publishing fewer posts but getting more views on the site has continued, with 2022 being comfortably the biggest year yet in terms of views and visitors.
– Page views: approximately 293k (an increase of about 22% over 2021)
– Site visitors: approximately 157K (an increase of about 27% over 2021)
Not only has it been the busiest year though, but 2022 also saw the site pass the landmark of 1 million page views – the current total is about 1.2 million. Every year I talk about how I genuinely can’t quite believe the number of people visiting the site, and it never ceases to amaze me just how popular some reviews/interviews/articles are (usually the Warhammer-related ones), but passing a million page views is really something else. I’ve said this many times, but it bears repeating – thank you so much to everyone who’s visited over the last nine years! I would probably still be writing at least something for Track of Words regardless, but knowing that people find it useful is a big motivating factor for keeping working on it.
To finish off the numbers, here’s a couple of ways in which the 125 posts in 2022 can be broken down. Firstly by type of post:
- 56 reviews, of which:
- 39 regular book reviews
- 9 short story reviews
- 3 Short and Sweet review roundups
- 3 A Few Thoughts On… reviews
- 2 In Brief reviews
- 22 interviews, of which:
- 15 regular author interviews
- 3 SFF Community Spotlight interviews
- 3 Author Spotlight interviews
- 1 in-depth 2-part interview (with Matthew Farrer)
- 44 articles, of which:
- 18 assorted articles
- 14 guest posts
- 12 Monthly Roundups
- 3 pieces of fiction, of which:
- 2 original stories
- 1 excerpts post
I haven’t looked at things in this way before, but here’s how the different post types break down as a proportion of the whole (rounding up, which is why they total 101%):
- 56 reviews = 45% (the same proportion as 2021)
- 22 interviews = 18% (5% down from 2021)
- 30 articles written by me = 24% (1% down from 2021)
- 17 guest contributions = 14% (7% up from 2021)
My main takeaway from these numbers is the increase in guest contributions, which I’m really pleased by – especially the fiction, which I’m very grateful to be able to publish.
Lastly, it’s interesting to note that I published 27 Black Library-related posts in 2022 (accounting for 22% of the total), compared to 48 (28%) in 2021. As I’ll talk about below, that represents my increasing interest in covering a wider range of SFF, and if I’m honest my increasing feeling that BL really takes its readership for granted.
Review of 2022 goals
At the start of the year I set out some goals – for Track of Words, and for my reading in general – that I wanted to work towards, so now the year is at an end let’s have a look at how I did. Here’s last year’s goals post if you’re interested.
ToW Goal: Publish a similar number of posts to 2021
As I’ve already mentioned, I ended up publishing 44 fewer posts this year than in 2021, with 125 compared to 169, so I didn’t exactly hit this goal. The idea was to aim for three per week, but I quickly realised that two per week was actually going to be more manageable (apart from in December, when I knew I wanted to do another Advent Calendar series), and in hindsight I think one post every three days or thereabouts is about right as a general number to aim for. That’s certainly what I’m planning on aiming for in 2023.
This year more than any before though, I genuinely struggled for enthusiasm for quite a lot of the time. Inevitably there are some weeks over the course of any year when I feel less motivated to write and to organise interviews and so on, but this year I found it particularly tricky for quite a long time. Maybe it was external circumstances, or writing fatigue after years of doing this, or probably a combination of lots of factors, but I think the smaller number of posts is generally indicative of finding motivation hard to come by. By the end of the year though I felt in a better place, thankfully, and while I may not have managed what I set out to do, I’m still pleased with what I did publish.
ToW Goal: Focus less on reviews
I was hoping to spend more time this year writing articles and putting together interviews, rather than working on reviews, but while I did do some of those things I found it quite hard to get into the right frame of mind. I did actually write fewer reviews in 2022 than in 2021, but as a proportion of the total number of posts they ended up about the same, and as you can see from the stats above I put together fewer articles and interviews in proportion to last year. I think this was mostly down to what I just mentioned about enthusiasm and motivation – interviews in particular require much less actual writing from me, but far more planning and organisation.
That said, I had fun working on all of the interviews and articles that I was able to put together, so all in all I’m still pleased with what I did manage.
ToW Goal: Broad coverage of SFF
This is one goal that I did comfortably meet. The plan was to continue to focus less on Warhammer (which used to dominate ToW) and more on broader SFF titles, not just in my own reading but in what I cover on the site too. As I mentioned earlier I did still review a few Black Library books and put together a few BL-related articles and interviews, but they were very much the minority this year, and I’m glad. BL coverage on the site continues to be incredibly popular but I just don’t have the enthusiasm for it at the moment, whereas almost every time I pick up a new SFF release from publishers like Head of Zeus, Jo Fletcher Books, Tordotcom or Aconyte, I find that I can’t wait to talk about it.
Reading Goal: read 52 books
I smashed this, reading a whopping 150 books in 2022. To my surprise, I might add! When I finished 2021 having read 136 books I thought I probably wouldn’t get anywhere near that number ever again, so to have read even more this year is genuinely unexpected. I’ve had a total blast reading so much this year, but in hindsight I think I’ve possibly hit my limit in terms of still enjoying and actually being able to remember what I’m reading. I always set a goal of 52 books for the year, and usually end up going considerably over that, but in 2023 I might try to slow down just a bit and consciously take a bit more time with each book. We’ll see how that goes.
Reading Goal: Keep listening to audiobooks
2021 was the year that I really got into listening to audiobooks, and I wanted to carry on that enthusiasm into 2022 – which I very much did. For probably the first two thirds of the year I really blasted through a lot of audiobooks, helped by going out walking every day (I absolutely love listening to audios while walking). That slowed down towards the end of the year after I developed a problem with one of my feet, which has meant I’ve had to cut right down on how much I walk, but listening to audiobooks is now such a familiar part of my routine that I’m still managing a reasonable amount even though I’m not going out and about very much. I’ll definitely continue this in 2023 – I can’t see myself doing anything else, as I’m enjoying audios so much.
Reading Goal: Read both for fun and to review
I always want to make sure reading remains something I do for fun, so I’m keen to keep picking up books to read purely for the enjoyment of reading without needing to think about writing reviews. In 2022, out of the 150 books I read I reviewed 53 of them in some fashion (mostly full reviews, but some in shorter reviews and roundups), which means I read 97 just for the fun of reading them. That 53 is actually about the same number as in 2021, but proportionately it’s marginally less. Either way, I think that’s a pretty good balance. Interestingly, I would say I’m still reviewing most of the SFF books I read, and the majority of those 97 just-for-fun books were from other genres like crime fiction or nature writing.
Reading Goal: Diversity of reading
For a few years now I’ve been trying to make sure I don’t just read books written by white men – not that there’s anything wrong with that (after all my favourite author, Terry Pratchett, was a white man) just that publishing as a whole does still, in my opinion, have a lack of diversity that means non-male writers and writers of colour continue to be less visible. I can either go with the flow of that, or make a conscious effort to read widely and enjoy a good mix of voices and perspectives. In terms of gender I’ve done pretty well in 2022, reading 55% books written by women, 41% written by men, and 4% written by male/female writing partnerships, non-binary authors or multiple authors (in anthologies).
Where I haven’t done so well is in reading books by non-white authors – over 90% of the books I read in 2022 were written by white authors. So that’s something I’m aiming to address in 2023, all being well. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not going to stop reading books written by white men – I am, after all, a white male myself. I just want to find new authors with different viewpoints, and enjoy reading as widely as possible.
Reading Goal: Catch up on my 2021 TBR
I pretty much failed with this last goal, but that’s not much of a surprise really. I started 2022 off quite well, catching up on a few books I had been sent in 2021 but hadn’t got around to reading – things like Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline, Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes. I couldn’t maintain that momentum though, and I still have a fair few 2021 books (not to mention countless older books that have been on my shelves for ages) still waiting to be read. It’s always hard to keep on top of the TBR list though, with exciting new books inevitably jumping the queue, but I’ll keep chipping away at the backlog and see how I get on.
***
That was 2022 then, a year of personal ups and downs with some achievements that I’m proud of, especially set against the backdrop of continued upheaval and uncertainty in the real world. I hope you had as good a 2022 as possible, and let’s hope 2023 gets off to a good start too. I haven’t settled on any specific 2023 goals as yet, although I suspect they’ll be quite similar to last year’s, but I’ll probably talk about those once I’ve decided on them.
In the meantime, I’ll once more say a big thank you for visiting Track of Words – I really appreciate it.
If there’s anything you would like to see on Track of Words in 2023, or if you’ve got any comments or questions about this article, please do let me know. You can get in touch in the comments below or over on Twitter.
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