I have successfully made it through another year of blogging. One post a week, for an entire year, for the second year in a row.

This year I wrote 47 posts, totaling in 44,110 words. I also hosted four guest writers (for a total of five guest posts) which made up the last of the year’s blog content. Thank you Angela, Valerie, Constance and Brea!

Some people question the value of blogging. I don’t make money from these words I commit to write each week, and usually only about forty people read them. But it’s more than stubborn pride and discipline that keep me coming back, each week, with words to share. These posts are not only a collection of my work, they are a scrapbook of writing memories. The conferences I attended. The books I published. The road trips I took. The books I read. The authors I admired. The thoughts, ideas and experiences I had.

But more than anything else, it is me, getting better, one week at a time. It pushes me to generate an idea and see it all the way through to the end, once a week. It gives me the opportunity to write 1,000 words, every seven days. Fellow Wisconsin author, Blair Braverman, once told me in a workshop that an instructor told her to write 50,000 words, throw them away, and then, she’d be ready to write a book. Or something like that. Some people write one short story a week to accomplish this feat. Instead, I write a blog post. And even though I don’t typically write nonfiction outside of my posts, I feel that this practice still serves me well in my book writing.

I wrote about a lot of different topics this year. Below you will see my top ten most popular posts. But if I were to pick, I think my most favorite posts were the ones about Disney and Diverse Books and the difference friends can make in the writing world.

Sometimes we continue down a path and aren’t entirely sure why we continue to place one foot in front of the other. For awhile that’s the way I was feeling about this blog. But after taking the time to reflect for this post, I am fairly certain why I show up to write these words each week, and I feel even more confident about the fact that I will continue to do it in 2020.

Until next year, happy writing and happy reading!

Amanda

TOP 10 BLOG POSTS of 2019!

High Hopes: A Song for 2019

I’m guessing that good SEO and the popularity of the band Panic at the Disco is more to thank for the success of this blog post than any other factor. That, and it is the pin that gets saved the most often from my Pinterest account . Either way, this inspirational post, was viewed over 500 times, more than any other post in my blog’s history.

Switch it Up: A Graphic Essay

I tried something different in this essay, and apparently it worked! Infographics are a new-ish medium when it comes to information sharing and I thought I’d use their popularity to share information about my writing life on my blog. Turns out, people liked it! This post was read 306 times.

The Writing Life, Honestly its Not For Everyone

Thanks to Michael Perry and his generous share on Facebook, this post was read by over 200 people, making it my third most read post in 2019.

The Emotion Thesaurus: A Review by the Word Nerd

This post reviews a book from one of my favorite writing resource collections EVER! If you are still in need of a gift idea for a writer, add this one to your AMAZON cart ASAP. Thanks to the sharing of this post by the book’s authors Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi, this review was read 183 times.

Birthing a Book

This post about the creation process of the Close Quarters cover was viewed 112 times, making it my 5th most popular blog entry in 2019.

Different Roads Sometimes Lead to the Same Castle

The popularity of The Game of Thrones helped this post make it onto my top ten list. While I’ve never watched beyond the first season, I have read all of the books. It was hard to escape the flurry of the media storm created by the conclusion of this epic drama on screen. I share my thoughts about this phenomenon in this post that was viewed 111 times.

10 Ways to Blog About Your Book to Increase Sales

I think that this post was the most helpful post I wrote all year. C. Hope Clark from Funds for Writers must have thought so too, because she published a reprint of it on her site as well. I’m not sure how many of her 45,000 followers read it, but on my site it got 99 reads.

Girls Stop Apologizing: A Book Review and Thoughts from an Authorprenuer

I loved this book, so much. If you are curious about the feminine cultural phenom that is Rachel Hollis or are looking for a book to give you a pep-talk, pick-me-up or entrepreneur kick in the pants, this is the one for you. This post was my 8th most popular and was read 96 times.

A Shout Out to Our Big Shared World

I spent a lot of time in 2019 working for an amazing cultural connectivity company. A job, that sometimes even included writing blog posts! You can learn all about the amazing work being done by my friend Colleen Waterston, and my involvement in that work in this post, which when originally posted, was read 91 times.

#MGBOOKTOBER

And finally, #10. This post about my favorite middle grade books was read 77 times. If you are in the market for a good book, no matter your age, this list has some GREAT ones!

So, there you have it. It is my sincerest hope that you enjoyed reading the posts as much as I have creating them. I look forward to sharing more of my writing journey with you next year.

P.S. Stop back next week for a run down of the ten best books I read in 2019!!

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