2022 Edition of All Things Stats

I’m back this Friday participating in another Let’s Talk Bookish post! This weekly bookish discussion series was created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted with Dani @ The Literary Lion. However, in April of 2022, Aria @ Book Nook Bits took over! For this week, our topic is: the 2022 Edition of Reading & Blogging Reflections. For me, I’m also going to lump in my other statistics, since writing separate posts just seems silly to me when I could combine them.

To see my statistics from previous years, go here: 2021 and 2020.

Let’s reflect!

A Caveat

Like I mentioned last year, I want to start with a caveat (using a lot of the same language directly). If you share any of these hobbies and you feel the itch to start comparing, stop. Stop right there. I share these numbers because I think it’s fun to look, using them as tools to help inform new efforts, applaud growth and recognize hiccups.

But, I’ve fallen into the comparison trap many times, especially with blogging. It’s easy to compare and find yourself lesser and thus assign an aspect of your worth in relation to those numbers.

That’s bullshit.

So, before anyone tries, I want that to be very clear. This is all for fun and is not to meant to make anyone feel lesser (including myself). So, let’s give ourselves all grace, shall we? 🖤

Blogging Statistics

This blog is my main base. It’s my home away from home, my weird little corner of the internet that I can call my own, without fuckheads with fragile egos messing it up (iykyk). Though, if I’m being honest, I wish my blog received more traffic, more engagement and more growth this year. Yet, I am still very, very proud of it.

In 2022, I:

• Published 112 posts
  • 2021: 135 posts, so wrote 23 less posts this year
• Had 9,000+ views and 4,000+ unique visitors
  • Last year, I had roughly the same amount, so at least we’re consistent!
• Have 949 followers
  • This is 28 new followers this year! 🎉
  • Down from last year’s growth of 43 new followers.
• Wrote 104,000+ words
  • Compared to last year’s 111,000 words, I managed to be just a smidge more brief. 😂

Stats Via Charts

All the different chats below are generated by using the amazing Kal @ Reader Voracious’s spreadsheet. I absolutely love it and it’s so fun to visualize things at the end of the year!

I break down my categories into a handful of different sections: Discussion Posts, Book Reviews, Writing Posts, Personal Posts, Allyship Round-Ups, Book Blogging and miscellaneous posts. Out of 112 posts, personal took up 17% of my posts (compared to 15% last year). Discussions dropped from 18% last year to 15.5% this year. And I split book blogging type content into three different areas this year: book blogging (general things), reviews, discussions and wrap-ups.

In terms of how people response to these types of posts, you can see that data from the graph below:

Discussions and personal posts continue to be the most popular overall. Which, honestly, I’m pretty proud about, since those are some of my favorite posts to write! Reviews due decently, but my allyship posts continue to barely reach at all. I gotta figure out a better way in 2023, I think.

Finally, if we look at views and follower count, we can see how sporadic this year truly was. Honestly, seeing how little movement the follower graph made makes me a bit sad. 😂 The monthly views, at first, was a bit disheartening ,because I only had one month over 1,000 views. Yet, seeing me still be on track with where I was at last year–even with my hiatus month, this month–made me feel a bit better!

Reading Statistics

Reading, however, is where things get a little more depressing. 😅

I said the exact same thing last year and we’re keeping that line this year, because goodness. Please don’t tell me 30 books is my new average. I managed to read 32 books this year, despite feeling like I never read at all, with multiple months where I didn’t read a single thing. But, with 10 books of those books being required for my MFA, we’re really looking at 22 books I read for fun. 😭

And she calls herself a book blogger. 💀

Out of those 32 books, here’s how my genres break down:

Like last year, I read exactly 50% or half of my reads in the fantasy genre. And I enjoyed most of them! Science fiction I really bounced off of this year, depressingly. Plus, I didn’t read nearly as much romance as I wanted to. The biggest surprise is most likely the non-fiction. But, I read three antiracist books this year and then another eight or so books for research for my MFA.

Backlist has continued to dominate for me, which I’m not bummed about. Though gods, I need to get caught up on ARCs.

Some other stats not captured in graph form:

• 43% (14 out of 32) books I read were by BIPOC or queer writers (same percentage as last year!)
• I only read two sequels 💀
• Out of the 22 books I read for fun, 18 of them (81%) were new-to-me authors
• I read a total of 10,000+ pages, with 67% in the 299-499 page range
• My average rating was 3.97 gems

We have plenty of room for improvement next year, as you can see.

Freelance Editing Statistics

2022 marked the third full year I was a part-time freelance editor!

This year was a little quieter, freelance wise. Though I worked on the most projects, it definitely fell more into shorter work: queries and short stories, rather than novels. I won’t lie, I miss working developmentally on novels! But, I also had multiple months where I wasn’t able to promote, due to health reasons or my day job draining me.

Though I really want to improve this area, I am still very proud of it. Plus, making friends from it has meant so much to me.

Writing Statistics

Honestly, this has not been the year for writing, for me (nor the year that I kept up with any sort of tracking system for writing). I really want to work to change this in 2023, because I’m honestly getting depressed about how little writing has been in my life the past few years.

In Sum

So, 2022 is dead and gone! And I, for one, am so, so happy to see it go. Yet, this is one of my favorite posts to write, because it’s so nice to actually step back and look at what I did accomplish. Especially since depression has been with me quite a bit this December, making me think I accomplished nothing. Which is just not true. Still, I am glad to put another year in the books and to look at what 2023 will bring.

Thanks for being on this journey with me. I am very, very grateful to this corner of the internet. And I really hope you all have a wonderful news years. May 2023 be kind to each of us! ❤

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