I got a few very complimentary comments on my latest short story, and today I happened to notice that the read count had already broken 3,000. This got me wondering...

[Revised - First - this is NOT a beg for READS (I change the title). It's not a complaint. It's just a note that I was not expecting the numbers I saw. Please don't take it as a complaint. Also - I never said I was a BAD writer!]

See, 3,000 SOUNDED kinda high - to me, because most of my stuff took years to accumulate that kinda numbers (or at least that's what I was thinking). So, looked at the table Erin kindly provides, wishing I could sort by Total Hits... Then, it occurred to me that I probably could... See, those table headers were "Blue" like the titles and the "Edit" links. I went, "maybe I can click it and get it sorted." Sure enough.

Imagine my surprise to see that I had one with over 7,000 hits and ten posts with over 4,000 hits and another nineteen with over 3,000 (but less than 4,000). Now, if I ignored the title pages and/or first "chapters" in multi-part stories (cause those tend to be higher as people sample and change their mind...) I still found four with over 4,000 hits and eighteen in the 3,000-4,000 hit range. I was simply amazed.

A few of these were some of my short stories - including that new one:
  >   Bedtime Story
  >   Coming Out
  >   The Dare

I guess what shouldn't surprise me is that my ten part Novella The Reluctant Bridesmaid has nine (9) of the top fourteen (14) hit gainers. (It is a bit surprising that Post 7 and 9 have about a thousand less hits than the other eight (8) parts plus the cover page and notes page.)

I then wondered about comments... as I saw a few had a really nice number (for me)... The two tops on comments were the first and last postings of "The Reluctant Bridesmaid". Interestingly, my Hidden Gifts story (in Karen Page's SPA Universe) seems to average more comments than most of the rest of the longer pieces I've written. (Thank you all!!!)

I also saw one of my short stories Suprises All Around made it into the top ten for comments - despite less than 3,000 hits. And two other short stories had at least ten (10) comments (10+ comments is REALLY good - for me!): The Dare again and an old piece that I've removed (it wasn't really TG, and I wanted to be able to use it elsewhere.) - A farce called "The Rescue".

It was also interesting to see that some of my higher Hit bits were also among the lowest comment garners - guess they were booring. LOL

My conclusion? I dunno. I just found it interesting to look at things. No, I did come to some conclusions - at least where MY stories are concerned, there's no real correlation between hits and comments (I used to think there was a rough correlation - more hits implied more comments - but the numbers here have shown me otherwise.)

SOME of the things we've talked about before impact this - Sweet Sentimental stories are popular. Multi-part stories seem to have higher hit counts than single post stories. I may go back and look at the comments / stories themselves in more detail - to see if there may have been more meat in some of the posts - food for comment (or more problems!) But, that's what my gut tells me anyway. Problems and/or really fun/tough segments generate comments - as that's one reason I comment on other folks stuff.

One thing I found interesting was that there was little or no correlation between the things I most enjoyed (or enjoyed writing) and what readers found worthy to read and/or comment on.

Enough rambling... No - this wasn't a blog to generate hits! I only included the links, cause I've complained about others blogs where they didn't include the links.

Thanks,
Anne