2015 Year-End Numbers and Open Thread

[ladysisyphus]

If you've been here for the stats posts in the past, you'll notice things look a little different this time! That's because Google Analytics has been watching both s2b2 and shousetsubangbang.com, and the numbers from there are a lot more detailed than the ones LiveJournal generates.

Comments

[grendelity]

Okay, so I've been mulling this over and I have a couple of thoughts

[ladysisyphus]

Here's a very long response to item 1 (that I hope shows how much thought gets put into this):

That's one of the main reasons I wanted to make the wiki: so authors would have a chance to put those summaries/excerpts/warnings/what-not there. The diversity of the wiki pages also (I think) does a good job of not making their contents seem like the Voice Of God about anything. I try to encourage authors to use them! Readers who don't want them don't have to see them, and people who do just have to make two more clicks.

You're right that original fiction is hard to summarize. However, single sentences from original fiction make a lot less sense than you think they would as enticements. Honestly, the most compelling sentence is usually the first one, which is why the main s2b2 page has excerpts above the lj-cut, and why the individual story posts on Tumblr have those same excerpts. I also try to do some of this when I auto-tweet the Tumblr story posts, though obviously the 140-character limit confines me somewhat; even so, you get a little

[grendelity]

Oh, man, I totally respect all that reasoning. I think you're right! Hopefully we can all do a bit more signal boosting of particular stories in the future to get some traffic up. C:

For publishing, I mean print! Having a physical copy of all of this would be really, really cool, and if it was an annual thing then there would hopefully be a wide variety of authors and artists across all the themes. As for "best," I know that's tricky, but I was originally just thinking if authors/artists are particularly proud of something they've written, they could put it in the pile....or we could have nominations of material.

Print-by-demand publishers like Lulu would be able to produce the books, or there's the option of a Kickstarter for something that would be really high quality and expensive, like Print Ninja [but that's kind of a huge investment for a first time, haha]. I would be happy to contribute layout skills/labor if this is something people would be interested in. :>

[ladysisyphus]

Yet another exciting complication with print issues is the money issue: We don't want to charge, or even appear to be charging, for things people gave us for free. While that doesn't rule out having people pay for materials+shipping alone, it does make us wary about getting into things where money changes hands.

That being said: I'd really like to see if we can get them done someday, even zine-style and bound ourselves. So rest assured, this idea isn't completely out of left field.

Doing a best-of all-volunteer issue would probably be the best way around a lot of concerns. We actually solicited authors and artists, some years ago, to pick their best work for a digital collection; for a variety of reasons, the collection has not yet come together, though I have dreams that someday it will. I'd want to do another round of volunteering, though, in part because I'd want people to know that their work would possibly be used as part of monetary transactions they wouldn't see dividends on.

We've also talked about doing a pay-what-you-want