Happy Anniversary! Fluff About Fantasy’s First Year Stats

A potential author picture for inside the cover of Chasing Fae

Hooray! Today marks Fluff About Fantasy’s one year anniversary and the website’s one hundredth post!

I am so proud of what I have been able to accomplish in the last year. I’ve grown such a vast audience in such a short amount of time, and I want to thank all of my readers who have been with me since the beginning. I have immensely enjoyed contributing stories about my experiences writing fantasy and what I have learned along the way. This is one of my favorite projects to work on during the week, and your support is immensely appreciated. To celebrate, I wanted to share with you the stats of all of my and Fluff About Fantasy’s platform from the first year. Tracking the progress has been really fun; I’m so happy with how far I’ve come as a person and as a writer through this site.

Without further ado:

fluffaboutfantasy.com

Current Status (as of midnight 1/27/20)

One post per week
100 posts!
60 subscribers–> 44 WordPress followers, 16 email followers
Guest Posts: Daniel Sage, Lydia Lee
Interviews: Elias Alam
Approximately 50 visitors a week
Created Free Revision Checklist for Beginners – not getting a lot of takers so far. STILL AVAILABLE!
Listed on Feedspot’s Top 60 Fantasy Book Blogs And Websites For Fantasy Readers and Authors from July 2019 through January 2020 (present).
58 Countries in the first year (in order of number of views): United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, China, Australia, Bangladesh, Philippines, Germany, Sri Lanka, France, India, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Turkey, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Poland, Taiwan, Macedonia, Iceland, Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, Finland, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Hungary, Romania, Pakistan, Armenia, Thailand, Jamaica, Slovenia, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Aruba, Mexico, Croatia, Vietnam, Russia, Uruguay, Israel, Guernsey, Tanzania, Indonesia, Austria, Norway, Morocco, Chile, Italy, Lithuania.
2608 total views: 74% US, 7% UK, 3% Canada, 2% Ireland, 2% China, 12% everywhere else.

Facebook

Current Status (as of midnight 1/27/20)

Posts about every blog posts.
Only a small number of unique posts so far – usually only for major announcements
Facebook Live Q&A session coming soon!
83 followers

Twitter

Current Status (as of midnight 1/27/20)

4405 followers
Impressions in the 50k per month range
In the last three months
- 250.5k impressions
- 2.2% engagement
- 1 link click per day
- 3 retweets per day
- 52 likes per day
- 8 replies per day

Instagram

Current Status (as of midnight 1/27/20)

All blog posts linked!
Regular updates
Instagram Live session coming soon!
128 followers

Pinterest

Current Status (as of midnight 1/27/20)

All blog posts pinned
9 followers
Inspiration boards for each House semi-regularly updated with new ideas
Pinterest stats fluctuate so much, but currently seeing 7.6k Monthly viewers

If you’re not already keeping up with me and Fluff About Fantasy on all of the social media platforms, make sure to follow, like, and subscribe! Chasing Fae is due to be released July 2020, and you’ll want to be the first to hear all the publishing updates. Much love to everyone, and happy writing!

Preliminary Thoughts on Marketing for Chasing Fae

After posting my big news, I really didn’t know what to post next. I’ve got two more days until my big anniversary post, and everything I was thinking of seemed anticlimactic. Maybe on Sunday, I will go back to a post about fantasy writing, or maybe not. I may ride this out a little bit and switch back to fantasy writing posts on Saturdays.

So today, I thought I would share some of the thoughts that I’ve come up with today on how I want to begin marketing for Chasing Fae. I would really love for writers and readers alike to comment their opinions and any ideas that you have for places and people I should reach out to. Please please please share! All of the input I can get is very valued.

Email Newsletter for Chasing Fae

I desperately need to create an email newsletter. I know that it is one of the best ways to connect with fans and share up-to-date news about your books and your writing life. I have just never been able to find the right time or the right way to go about it. The last time I tried to create a newsletter, I started a really cool template on MailChimp. I really liked that platform, but when I went to send a test email to myself, I realized my home address was printed at the bottom of the newsletter. I was a bit horrified, so I tried to turn that off. It turns out that because of international spam law, a mailing address has to be printed. I thought about using my William and Mary PO box, but I haven’t made a solid decision about that yet. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Revamping My Facebook Profiles

Fluff About Fantasy currently has a Facebook page, and frankly, it doesn’t get a lot of traffic at the moment. I want to spend some time making some unique posts on that platform outside of posting links to every Fluff About Fantasy post. Closer to the release date, I’d like to host a live video Q&A session! I’ve never done one before, and I would love to try it out. I’m also toying with the idea of creating a Facebook author profile that focuses on my work as an author and/or a Facebook group specifically for Chasing Fae. I don’t know if I need all that just on Facebook, but I think each type of Facebook profile has its own merits.

Who To Reach Out To In Anticipation Of The Book Release

I have a lot of people to reach out to!

I’ve spoken briefly to my high school back home so far about promotion for my book, and they are excited about my work! I’m really happy to be able to share this with my former classmates and the current student body. I haven’t reached out to the right people at my college yet, but it is only day one. These will be my first places to promote my book through newsletters, any public announcements, and hopefully, communicating with librarians to potentially house my book.

Regional newspapers would be a good place to send a press release to if I can find the courage to make the connection. I’m looking at three cities right now: Charlotte, Williamsburg, and Richmond (the biggest city close to me). I also want to find websites and magazines devoted to young adult books and/or the fantasy genre who may have a place for me to submit a guest post with my bio or welcome authors to promote their work. Still working on that research! If you have any good names or websites, please comment below!

That’s the bulk of what I have so far. Thank you so much for all your support in this journey so far. I can’t believe I’m finally kicking off the publishing journey! I’m going to have so much to share with you over the next coming months, so stay tuned!

Happy writing, everyone!

Fluff About Fantasy: Official Announcements

Hey everybody! I am aware that my presence on this site has been someone lax lately. I promise I’ve got a lot of reasons big and small of why my life has been so busy, and today’s post is about making all of those announcements as well as some new changes to the site!

Announcement #1: Scaling Back

I am so passionate about Fluff About Fantasy that it has been absolutely killing me not to be able to write two posts a week as I did last semester. But to give you an idea of how this semester is going, I’m taking essentially three history classes and two languages, including starting an entire new language (German). Now while I love all of these classes, the reading load and the work load is nearly double what it was last year. I feel like I’m moving forward towards my academic goals with fantastic speed, but it means my time has dramatically shifted.

Because of this, I’m going to officially cut down to one post a week on Saturdays. This way, I can put out a clear and interesting post of decent length out to my readers without placing too much stress on myself. I want to put out information that you all are going to want to read and want to use in your writing endeavors.

I hope I won’t lose any of my readership by scaling back! I’m still looking to expand and grow; it’s just going to take a little more time than I thought.

Announcement #2: My Departure From The Pantheon

Today, I officially left the writing project, All in The Pantheon. I have loved writing for Aphrodite for the last six months, and the people at the Pantheon are some of the most wonderful people I have ever met in my life. But my time has become too short, and I have had little to no time for my own writing pursuits like Chasing Fae or Fluff About Fantasy or my new upcoming book (see Announcement #3). I had to make some tough choices about what activities to cut out of my overcommitted life, and unfortunately, this was one of the things that had to go.

It was so tough having to leave. My last couple days with them were fantastic; I got so many well wishes from everyone. My friend, Nikki (who writes for Nike) did not want to let me leave at all. I love her so much; she’s always been one of my favorite people at the Pantheon. But she also made me super emotional! My friend, Ashley, (who writes for Nyx) adopted me through their #AdoptAMortal initiative on Twitter before I had even announced my official departure! It was super exciting and made me feel a lot better about whether I would still hear from these fantastic writers. I got added to a new group chat with some of the writers so I could keep in touch, and I’m still on the unofficial Discord chat.

If you haven’t started reading the amazing stories at All in the Pantheon, you should head over there now! My stories will still remain up for a while, so catch them while you can!

Announcement #3: Book Creator News

The Book Creator program that I’ve enrolled myself in is going fantastic so far! I’ve loved learning from Professor Koester and the other young writers taking part in the program. I’m still in the researching and interviewing phase for now, but I’m starting to get really excited about the writing process. I’m looking right now at a potential July 2020 release through this program. Stay tuned for more news!

Announcement #4: Other Social Media Accounts

I’m working on expanding my social media presence across multiple platforms to gain more traffic. I would appreciate it if you would all help spread the word!

That’s all for now, my friends! Look forward to a new post about writing next Saturday!

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