Another mystery

I have a mystery… it’s all about my being here… not here as in here on earth, but here as in here writing my blog.

I’ve been writing here for quite a while now; I started for several reasons – some of which I didn’t realise at first. To begin with I wanted to promote my books – as a self-publishing writer I don’t have any team behind me, no editors, agents, publishers, just me and faithful advice-offering family and friends. So I started a blog to share not just my books, but my ideas on writing and my thoughts on the processes.

I soon began to realise there were other reasons which kept me here, and kept me very happily here – I enjoyed what I was doing, I enjoyed the writing, and I absolutely loved the interaction with people who read what I wrote – it was such an unexpected delight to have ‘conversations’ with people who only met me through what I wrote.

Over the years my audience has grown – which is what writers want, to reach more people! This year I was excited to find even more people were visiting my stories and bits and pieces and I worked harder to continue and write about different things. All was going splendidly well…

All was going well until in the summer, my readers dropped away, there was a catastrophic decline in numbers. Some days only two or three people looked at what I’d written, instead of nearly two hundred… I was shocked… was I doing something wrong? Had the site crashed? Was it the splendid summer keeping people away from their screens? I looked at what I was writing, took even more care over it… One reason was a policy change from Facebook which no longer allowed automatic posting – was that the reason?

I tried not to let this affect me… after all as I said at the beginning, I’m writing here for many reasons. I started manually sharing to social media (do I mean manually? I mean I actively shared links!)

Things have improved a little, and I really appreciate everyone who does read what I write, and those who make comments… but it is still a mystery…

I love blogging, it’s a wonderful way to exercise my writing muscles and keep up my creative fitness! So I won’t be stopping – I can’t imagine ever stopping! it is just a mystery though!

My featured image is of some cheery Tasmanian dolphins