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| Photo by Filipe Delgado |
To quote '80s pop sensation Yazz: "The only way is up, baby!"
It looks as though it took hitting rock bottom at the start of May, with the whole "this is the end of HeroPress" doom and gloom, for me, and the blog, to bounce back with a month of posts that I must say I'm rather proud of.
I even posted more articles last month (111) than I did in March (102, this year's previous most productive month).
And you know it's not a real audience because no one leaves any comments. Not that HeroPress gets many comments in the first place, but you'd think if someone was genuinely hunting out an old story they might leave a "wow, so glad I finally found this" comment.
When these articles float up into the "top 10" posts of the week I have to pop behind-the-scenes and revert them to draft format, so no more bots can target them.
Of course, this now means I have a stupid number of posts in draft format, but I guess I'll republish them at Christmas, or something like that.
In the face of all this aggravation, I've still managed to justify several old stories that made the top posts of the month to myself: for example, my review of Spider-Man: No Way Home might have gained some traction as I believe it was recently added to Disney Plus in the States; the map of Xadia might be attracting real eyes as the new season of The Dragon Prince is due to arrive soon; and my review of the documentary on Jodorowsky's Dune might be popular again as a side effect of the release of the trailer for the new Dune movie.
Of course, I could just be fooling myself.
On the other hand, I'm genuinely pleased to see my recent review of the Free Comic Book Day prequel issue of Conan The Barbarian has done well, thanks in no small part to writer Jim Zub sharing it (with a link) on his newsletter and website.
Other comic book stories attracted a decent amount of attention (the Kickstarter for the second issue of Dark Legacies by Babylon 5's Claudia Christian, and the apparent end of Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer from Opus), which, at least, lets me know that my scribblings about comic books are of interest to others.
Conversely, and again highlighting the frustrating nature of social media, articles I've shared on my Facebook wall have gained plenty of comments and likes, but this hasn't been reflected in the stats on HeroPress because people are simply reacting the pictures - and minimal text - that I'm putting on Facebook, instead of clicking through the link to the full story on the blog!
In fact, 'hit stats' across the board continue to be insultingly low, but I'm in a positive mood at present and so am choosing to ignore these as much as I can and still make the effort to deliver the best content I can for the dozen or so loyal readers I have.
Looking ahead, I might not be writing much about RPGs at the moment - in part because the Tuesday Knights have been on yet another unplanned hiatus since March - but I have plans to correct that.
These plans involve my latest 'definitive' decision on the nature of my chosen 'one true game' to run, eventually, for the group. Well, definitive for this month anyway.
More news on that particular subject if I don't change my mind the next time I see an action movie or TV show that makes me think: "No! Forget everything! THAT is the setting and/or genre I want to run for the Tuesday Knights."
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