It’s hard for me to believe it’s been a whole year. But it has.
This weekend we’ll publish the 12th edition of our blog carnival Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies.
In my original post, I revealed that starting a blog carnival had been an aim of mine from the time I first started blogging. Readers responded enthusiastically, and bloggers in the self-publishing and writing fields have continued to supply a steady stream of articles.
Blog carnivals are still underutilized from what I can see, but they make good sense. Readers get a variety of content on a focused subject, bloggers get traffic and visitors they might not otherwise have gotten, and the host enjoys the traffic from links to lots of blog posts.
The Series So Far
I took a look at the stats for the Carnival posts, and here’s what I found (including Sunday’s post):
- Featured bloggers: 34
- Book design: 18 articles
- E-books: 20 articles
- Indie Author: 23 articles
- Marketing & Selling: 81 articles
- Self-Publishing Success: 25 articles
- Writing Tools & Tips: 41 articles
- Total: 242 articles
Of course, all these blog posts have gotten thousands of visits over the year, and Issue #1, which has been posted the longest, has the most.
One thing that’s interesting is that the time people spend on the Carnival posts is much longer than average on this blog, about 5 and a half minutes. The average for all pages here is about 3 minutes.
It’s been an honor and a pleasure to put this blog carnival together every month, but I confess I’ve had outstanding assistance in creating and running the carnival from Shelley Sturgeon of E-Vantage Business Services. I’m quite sure I couldn’t have done it as regularly, or as well, without her help.
So to Shelley, all the readers, and all the generous bloggers who have shared their content, thanks for a great year. I look forward to more.
(I bet you haven’t seen all these great articles. Click over to the main Carnival of the Indies page for a complete set of links right at the top of the page.)
And watch for Issue #12 on Sunday.
Photo by Nick Bramhall
