Webstats review

I've been running two webcounters on my site now for about a week. I've no way to know if this has been a "typical" week, but if so, the results have been quite sobering.

( Here's why. )

The upshot is that my recs page provides a valuable community service but that not terribly many people read my stories at my website (I'm archived in multiple places so my total readership is certainly higher). I can't contribute yet to discussions as to the ratio of readers to feedback as I haven't received any fb this week.

Edited to add: My ratio seems to be one actual reader per eight pagehits. Even so, this makes my annual website readership of the order of 2750 people. If it's always the same readers visiting, then this figure is lower; if pagehits spike whenever a new story is put up, then the figure is higher. This doesn't count those who read my fic on popular websites, of course, and I strongly suspect that those readers must considerably outnumber my website visitors (but this suspicion is based on nothing more than my own early fic-reading habits). All these figures compare well to print runs of first novels in Australia, which I understand are usually at the 3000 copy mark.

I wriite fiction because I enjoy it, even though I am apt to moan here about the difficult bits. I wrote for fifteen years without showing anything I wrote to more than a few people; I would hardly have persisted if I didn't find the act of writing satisfying in itself. But it's always gratifying to know that I have readers.

BtVS/AtS fanfic readership numbers

In a reply to my last post about website visitor numbers, azdak wrote:

3000 is a hell of a lot of people, way more than I would have expected

I knew there had to be at least a thousand people reading BtVS/AtS fic because there's more than that subscribed to the BetterBuffyFics mailing list alone (1380 today). Fanfiction.net lists 7076 authors of BtVS fanfiction. The total number of writers must be higher, especially as the site no longer archives NC17 fic, which is a reasonable proportion of BtVS/AtS output, and because many people write coterie fic in LJ these days. So a reasonable order-of-magnitude estimate of the number of authors is maybe 10,000 or so, but I don't know how many of these writers are still in the fandom.

I have no idea of the ratio of writers to readers. One in three? One in ten? One in a hundred? Whatever the ratio, we're still looking at a BtVS/AtS fanfic readership in the tens of thousands and possibly the hundreds of thousands.

drinkthepoisonx of All About Spike posted some site stats a while back. These show that in 2003 (or near enough), the number of visits to the title page per month (as opposed to pageviews) never fell below 50,000. In an eighteen day period in January of this year, there were a total 460,000 pagehits at the site. Of course, I may well have been 46 of them :)

I'm not sure what figures from the publishing industry it would be appropriate to compare these numbers to. Genre magazine circulation maybe? The main sf and fantasy magazines, such as Asimov's, Analog and F&SF have a paid circulation of 20,000-40,000 per issue, although of course the total number of readers will be higher. The UK magazine Interzone has an estimated readership of maybe 10,000. So last year Laura's website was probably about as well-read as some of the major sf magazines. Of course, it's free while the magazines are not, so this may constitute comparing apples with kiwifruit or fish.

Despite the rubbery nature of many of the above figures, one things is clear: there's quite a lot of us out there. More than I'd thought, at least.