Top Tens of 2015

[ladysisyphus]

Distilled from the year-end data (plus a bunch of other numbers), here are some Top Ten lists to let you know what people were reading and enjoying in 2015!


Top Ten Most-Visited Submissions (from any year) on LiveJournal

1. 25 Lives
2. The Exile's Tale and Other Complete Wastes of Time
3. Strange Lexicons
4. Boys Keep Fucking Up My Car
5. Make It Work
6. Songs You Know by Heart
7. Universal
8. This Year's Prom King
9. Our Lives in These Empty Spaces Aside
10. The Breathing Lessons

Top Ten Most-Visited Submissions (from 2015) on LiveJournal

1. The Exile's Tale and Other Complete Wastes of Time
2. Boys Keep Fucking Up My Car
3. Universal
4. The Breathing Lessons
5. The shadow in the classroom
6. Hunter
7. The Bridegroom
8. Flashes
9. A Genealogy of Magic
10. Narcissus

Top Ten Most-Visited Submissions (from any year) on Our Website

1. Duet for Tenor and Transradial Orthosis
2. Strange Lexicons
3. No Hero Manual Included
4. The Revelation of Orev
5. The White Palace
6. Makes Three
7. The Campsite Rule
8. 25 Lives
9. Our Lives in These Empty Spaces Aside
10. El Presidio Rides North

Top Ten Most-Visited Submissions (from 2015) on Our Website

1. The Exile's Tale and Other Complete Wastes of Time
2. The Breathing Lessons
3. A Genealogy of Magic
4. Night Begins the Day
5. The Hidden Play
6. Universal
7. Flashes
8. The Hail Mary
9. The Wild Black Yonder
10. Collide

Top Ten Most-Liked Submissions (from any year) on Our Website

1. Strange Lexicons
2. 25 Lives
3. The Revelation of Orev
4. White People Kissing in the Rain [WORKING TITLE]
5. El Presidio Rides North
6. Strength, Gallantry, and Other Useless Bits
7. Duet for Tenor and Transradial Orthosis
8. How Far You've Come
9. Boys Keep Fucking Up My Car
10. A Genealogy of Magic

Top Ten Most-Liked Submissions (from 2015) on Our Website

1. Boys Keep Fucking Up My Car
2. A Genealogy of Magic
3. The Breathing Lessons
4. The Hail Mary
5. The Exile's Tale and Other Complete Wastes of Time
6. Woodward Avenue
7. A beginner's guide to stealing home
8. Suspension
9. Railfans
10. Ve Cherinitat ral ve Mofellivun

Top Ten Landing-Page Submissions on LiveJournal*

1. 25 Lives
2. Make It Work
3. The shadow in the classroom
4. Songs You Know by Heart
5. Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye
6. Universal
7. The Exile's Tale and Other Complete Wastes of Time
8. Strange Lexicons
9. Sucker Born Every Minute (and Three on the Doorstep)
10. A beginner's guide to stealing home

* Here's the full explanation of a landing page, but the short version is, these are stories readers are clicking on from social media links. These could be from issue posts at bb_shousetsu, other LiveJournal accounts, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt, Pinterest, Pinboard, Facebook, Reddit, or pretty much any other social media platform you could name.

Top Ten Landing-Page Submissions on Our Website

1. The Campsite Rule
2. Makes Three
3. Smart-Aleck (Extra-Spicy Detective Stories, Issue 38, February 28, 1935)
4. We Are More
5. Glaive & Hill & the Matter of the Sapphic Society
6. Duet for Tenor and Transradial Orthosis
7. 25 Lives
8. Everything living tries to get back to the soil
9. The City of a Thousand Days
10. This Story Is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It

Some thoughts and further stats:

- Pieces published early in 2015 have an advantage over pieces published later in 2015 ... but only really when it comes to the website. LiveJournal-published submissions tend to get most all of their hits immediately after an issue's release, then aren't much visited after that. Conversely, at http://shousetsubangbang.com, where it's a lot easier to find back issues, pieces don't receive the same new-issue viewership, but they also have a much longer shelf life. This isn't to say either is better than the other, but it does explain some of the interesting discrepancies.

- Technically, standalone illustrations and comics are included in these calculations; they just don't often break the top ten (with the notable exception of 25 Lives).

- The landing pages are kind of a strange metric, because I want them to be measures of pages that people are linking to, but it includes bb_shousetsu; this alters the LiveJournal landing page statistics significantly, because it counts both people coming in from outside social media platforms and people just reading the dang issue. They're a lot more accurate for the website, since we don't put links to individual submissions on our LiveJournal-based issue posts.

- External links have a lot of traction and longevity. For instance, I know that the fact that The Campsite Rule tops the website landing pages is because of a single Tumblr post that, a year and a half later, still gets hits. 25 Lives, Songs You Know By Heart, and This Year's Prom King are three pieces that have years-old external referral links, so despite the fact that these are significantly older pieces, they're still making several of the lists measured by 2015 data alone.

- Not counting LiveJournal, external links from the past year have come mainly from the following sources, in descending order: to s2b2, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, reddit, Pinboard, deviantART, Gaia Online, InsaneJournal, Pocket, VKontakte, Blogger, Plurk, pinterest, WordPress, Quora; to our website, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, deviantART, Pinboard, reddit, Goodreads, Weebly.

- The F/F issues have a devoted following, but it isn't a large one. There are no F/F stories on any of the lists, except the last one -- which makes sense, because that's when said devoted following links and recs specific stories to one another. This is why we don't do more than one F/F issue a year -- but why we also always love the one we do!

- Insomnia and access to Google Analytics make me weirdly productive.