Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It’s Blogging 101: Thou shalt recap the year.

The books:

First, my sincere thanks to all the folks who tried one of my novels this year. The “free giveaway weekend” was a great success, numbers-wise, with over a thousand copies downloaded in three days. That’s a thousand potentially new readers out there, and it increased sales throughout the rest of the year.

To all who gave one of my novels a try this year, I hope you enjoyed them, and I encourage you to loan the book to a friend. If you are so inclined, leave a review on the site where you acquired the book. Spread the word.

It was a year filled with drama, deaths, and financial losses, and my writing output suffered as a result. However, I did find time and energy to finish and publish my novella, “The Revitalization of Emily,” on Kindle, and serialized a “long” short story, “Antelope Hunting with Sir John,” here on the blog.

Work on the new book, The Wolf Tree, finally got out of the research and preparation stage, but just barely. It’s hard for me to concentrate on writing when family members are in misery.

Still, it’s better than nothing, and I learned a lot along the way.

The blog:

As has been the trend, the most popular posts on this blog have nothing to do with writing. [sigh] My own fault, really. I’m the one posting the recipes and movie reviews.

The world is simply more interested in food and movies than in books and writers. This is not news. However, if I factor out all the searches for a recipe for David Chang’s Chicken Noodle Soup, all the queries about a “peeper’s dry plate,” and all the consumers wondering if stoneware is better than porcelain, I find that my solid group of readers has grown over the past year.

Even though I cut my schedule from daily posting to semi-weekly, traffic and subscriptions have both continued to steadily (albeit slowly) increase. Expansion to Tumblr, Good Reads, and LinkedIn have helped in that regard, but not much.

Overall, though, I still find this a worthwhile exercise, and I truly appreciate your interest, your presence, and your comments.

So, onward into 2014. The best of everything to you and yours in the coming year.

k