2016 April A-to-Z Blogging Challenge: Reflections
This past April, the blog went flash fiction and Paul McCartney mad. Bonkers. Completely loopy. And all thanks to this year’s A-to-Z Challenge. My theme for the month was “100 Word Flash Fiction Stories Based on Paul McCartney Song Titles.” Here’s a breakdown of how things went.
Method
Having done this for a few years now, I thought the best approach would be to start early and try to get all the posts written before April. Sometime in January, I decided upon the theme and made my list of songs. Some I chose because the song is a favorite, some I chose because I thought the title would be a challenge, and some I chose because there really wasn’t much choice (“Q” and “Z”)! The only letter Paul didn’t have covered was “X”, but I figured a way around that. I then set about writing the stories, mainly over February and March. I carried that list of songs around with me the whole time in the event I got a few moments in the day to work out stories.
Results
I was very pleased with the number of visits my pages received, and the kind comments people left on the stories. Thanks, guys! 🙂 It’s hard to quantify how popular each post was since the A-to-Z linky list only linked to my site, not to each individual post. So any hit counts I have will be based on people going directly to each story via Twitter, or maybe their RSS feed. The counts don’t include people visiting from the A-to-Z list; those visits get rolled up into the general daily site hits total. Bearing all that in mind, combining individual page hits and “likes”, here are my 2016 A-to-Z posts in order of popularity:
It’s not very scientific, but interesting nonetheless.
My Favorites: “Rainclouds”, “Used to Be Bad”, “Pretty Little Head”, “Zoo Gang”.
My Wife’s Favorite: “Backwards Traveller”
“Fan” Favorites (i.e., mentioned in the comments): “Coming Up”, “Hope of Deliverance”, “Backwards Traveller”, “Another Day”, “Girlfriend”.
Lessons Learned
It’s the same old problem: making time to visit the other A-to-Z-ers. I did manage to get to a number of them, but not as consistently as I’d hoped. That’s a shame since this is a key part of the challenge. I did find some new blogs to keep an eye on, which is good. Hopefully, keeping my posts short was helpful to visitors (a lesson learned from a few years ago). It can be tempting to write long articles, but if you only have a limited time to get around a lot of blogs, long posts can be daunting.
How was your A-to-Z experience?
I enjoyed the twist on your flash fiction. Visiting others was something I didn’t get around to as much as I’d like either, but I found a lot of awesome blogs that I read pretty much daily.
Thanks, Patricia! I’m glad you enjoyed the stories. 🙂
I enjoyed participating. (I also played in 2014.) I was at least able to visit those that visited me first, and I ended up adding most of them, including yours, to my blogroll.
Cool! Thanks, Silver Fox. I enjoyed your Super Heroes, too! 🙂
I had never heard of A-Z before you mentioned it at The Reef. The night before, I thought “why not?” And jumped in. Most of the time I had no idea what I was going to do and I usually had a tiny window of time to do it in (before work). Even when I planned on something, I ended up doing something else. Fun, but exhausting. I’ll probably be visiting all the blogs between now and next year.
I’m glad you enjoyed the A-to-Z experience, Cynthia. It blows me away that some (e.g., you and John Frain) actually wrote your posts the day before. It’s even more impressive that they were good, given the pressure you put yourselves under. I’m sure that in my first year of A-to-Z, I tried to write a few days in advance. Thanks for taking part. 🙂
Writing my posts in advance DEFINITELY made this year’s experience much nicer for me. But like you, I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to visit other blogs. I’ll be visiting over the next year.
I still think you’re insane for choosing this theme, but you handled it very well!
😛 LOL! Thanks, Dena! 😀
This year I pre-wrote all my posts too so I had a lot more time for visits but I decided (stupidly) to also do the final draft of my novel through April too so I didn’t get to visit everyone on the list!
Debbie
I know a number of people suspended work on their WiPs for the A-to-Z… and STILL didn’t get to visit as many people as they wanted to! So don’t feel too badly, Debbie. 🙂