Stats

I’m working on a book proposal.

I haven’t had to write a proposal in upwards of six years, not since my agent (Bob Hostetler with the Steve Laube Agency) landed me at Harlequin’s Love Inspired line. But I have a completed manuscript that’s been gathering metaphorical dust in my desk drawer, and since it doesn’t fit within the Love Inspired guidelines, my agent plans to shop it around to other publishers and see what happens. New publisher, new proposal. Bob is also in the process of negotiation my next multi-book contract with Harlequin.

The last time I wrote a proposal, Bob sent me a sample proposal and requested that I submit my information in the exact same format. The components included:

• Hook
• Summary
• Theme
• Audience
• Author
• Marketing
• Manuscript status
• Similar titles
• Other available books by author
• Synopsis
• First three chapters

As with many novice authors, a few of these categories were thin, notably the “Marketing” section, not to mention the “Other available books by author” section. In fact, I bent myself into pretzels with the Marketing section; for an explanation of why, read this blog post from March 2019 in which I was weeping with the despair of it all.

This time around, I’m following the format of my first proposal, and therein I made an interesting discovery.

Obviously I’ve got a stronger platform this time around, thanks to Harlequin’s generosity in publishing so many of my books. But in 2019, I noted that this blog received about 1.5 million page visits per year. At first I was inclined simply to slot that same number into the current proposal – after all, 1.5 million page views is nothing to sneeze at – but then I decided to check my most recent stats. And that’s what astounded me.

Here are today’s stats:

The numbers are a little hard to see, so I’ll list them:

• All time: 29,755,904 (this is over the 17-year span of this blog)
• Today: 118
• Yesterday: 25,545
• This month: 430,618
• Last month: 396,278

These are terrific numbers. But what really blew me out of the water was the total number of page views from the last year:

An incredible 4.37 million page views in the past 12 months! Almost three times as many as 2019!

And here’s the funny thing: I never check my stats. Honestly, the last time I checked was … well, probably back in 2019 when I was writing my last proposal. But somehow during that time, page views tripled. Go figure.

Don and I were discussing this, and he wants me to ask an honest question: Why do you, the reader, come to this blog?

And I’ll ask a question of my own: What kind of information or material do you want me to cover?

Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2026/09/stats.html