Done at PenguinCon, but alas I don't have the name of the artist!It’s the last week of 2011, a year that has, like most of them, had its good and bad moments. I remain hopeful about the future, and glad to be in this world, and I look forward to seeing what happens in 2012. I plan to fill it with writing, editing, and teaching. (And a certain amount of reading and playing video games and that sort of thing.)
Speaking of the productive part of those goals, I just sent off the last batch of feedback to someone on their NanoWriMo novel. I’ll remind folks that this is the last week to do so if you want to take advantage of my editing offer for NaNoWriMo novels mentioned here: http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2011/12/06/nanowrimo-what-now/
A couple of people have asked about my doing an edit of their stories for workshops like Clarion West or Clarion. I am willing to do a look over of the developmental edit type, where I suggest to you what needs to be amplified, eliminated, or otherwise changed, but I won’t do a sentence by sentence one, since you need to be getting in on your own merits, in my opinion.
Next week I’ll be announcing the next round of classes – stay tuned for some cool possibilities (in my opinion!)
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
Social Media: Pinterest Analytics and Links for 3/18/2013
August 8, 2015 edit: Hey folks, Pinterest has changed their analytics. Here’s the resource I used to update mine: https://help.pinterest.com/en/articles/pinterest-analytics. And for what it’s worth, I realized a lot of you were looking for info and stumbling across this through using them so they’re worth paying attention to!
Some notes: even after I’d verified, Analytics wasn’t appearing in the upper right-hand corner as specified. I logged out and back in, and then chose the “Switch to the New Look” option. At that point, I went back and read the instructions and realized Analytics will not work until you have switched over to the new look, which to me seems pretty similar to the old look.
I didn’t see any data on there at first, just the message, “We don’t have any data yet! Please wait for us to calculate it for you,” but I could see the options: Site Metrics, Most Recent, Most Repinned, and Most Clicked, as well as an Export button (always so handy). A day later, the same message was still displaying, but when I drilled down to look at the past seven days, I found I did have some data for the time since I’d validated my website. Pinterest Analytics aren’t semi-real time, the way Google Analytics are. Today’s data is not available until tomorrow.
Site metrics Pinterest will show you, along with my scores for the first few days:
Pins/Pinners:
Pins is the number of times people have pinned from your site, i.e. bookmarked a particular page by pinning an image from it. Pinners is the number of people who have done this. So these are people who are not accessing your site through Pinterest (at least they don’t have to be), but who are using Pinterest to save bookmarks. I a single individual pinned five pages from your site, pins would be five, pinners would be one.
Day one: 1 pin from 1 pinner
Day two: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day three: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day four: 0 pins, 0 pinners
Day five: 5 pins, 3 pinners
Repins/Repinners:
Repins is the number of times your content was repinned, meaning someone saw a page that had already been pinned on Pinterest and decided to save it to one of their boards. Repinners is the number of people who did this. So if someone pinned two pages, and one person repinned both of them, repins would be two while repinners would be one.
Day one: 0 repins, 0 repinners
Day two: 10 repins, 10 repinners
Day three: 2 repins, 2 repinners
Day four: 2 repins, 1 repinner
Day five: 3 repins, 3 repinners
Impressions/Reach:
Impressions is the number of times your image(s) appeared to someone on Pinterest, either in the main feed or through viewing a board or search results. Reach is the number of people who saw one or more of your image. I’ve bolded day five’s result, which surprised and pleased me.
Day one: 247 people saw 474 total images
Day two: 324 people saw 1063 total images
Day three: 242 people saw 1347 total images
Day four: 159 people saw 247 total images
Day five: 856 people saw 2957 total images.
Clicks/Visitors:
Clicks is the number of times people clicked on an image and viewed your site. Visitors is the overall number of people who did so.
Day one: Three images were clicked on, each time by a different person. As a note of interest, Google Analytics claims only one visitor from Pinterest that day.
Day two: Eight images, eight different visitors. (Google Analytics reports 6.)
Day three: Twelve images, one visitor. (Google Analytics reports 4.)
Day four: Two images, two visitors. (Google Analytics reports 2.)
Day five: Three clicks, three visitors. (Google Analytics reports 3 as well.)
Factors that might have affected those numbers:
Day three: I re-organized my boards so one with a lot of links pointing back to my site was in the top row. I submitted that board as a StumbleUpon bookmark. And I made one of my boards, fabulous female protagonists, a group board and invited some other people to pin to it.
Day four: I was completely absent from Pinterest activity.
Day five: I pinned a new piece from my site onto a personal board that collects similar pieces from my site.
The most repinned images are images attached to pieces with interesting content. The most repinned one is also one of the most popular pages on my site, 5 Things to Do in Your First 3 Paragraphs. This emphasizes one of the most important points for anyone working with SEO and web traffic stuff: good content is the most crucial thing.
And it’s also interesting to note the discrepancies between what Pinterest and Google Analytics is reporting, which emphasizes something about this sort of investigation: the numbers may be fuzzier than you think they are.
So why would you want to know any of this? Mainly to know if Pinterest is a successful way to drive traffic. It looks to me, based on this, that it’s quite capable of driving traffic and I really like those (relatively) high Impressions/Figure. Beyond that, it’ll let me know if some images are consistently getting pinned more often (or less often) so I can try to figure out why in order to use that knowledge when employing images in the future.
Why be interested in Pinterest as a social medium overall? Well, the jury’s still out in some ways. But it offers a chance to organize information in a new way. I’ve been planning to write up all my class descriptions on the blog and add them here, for example. There’s also some weird gender stuff going on around popular perceptions of it that someone needs to take apart (imo). Here’s an infographic about who’s using Pinterest.
Are you using Pinterest? If so, how do you use it?
Recent Social Media Links of Interest:
WordPress is looking to the future and will be doing more content curation. A lot of folks are hosting their blogs on WordPress and may want to look and see what has a chance of affecting them.
This Sunday’s online class is Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction. Come and pick up some new tools to use in your fiction!Hello folks! January has been crazy, and I have been bad about blogging. One thing I’m going to be doing going forward is scattering in some food posts, because I’m cooking a lot this year as well as working with the SFWA Cookbook Project.
BEASTS OF TABAT is coming out on March 27, 2015, at Emerald City ComicCon, which is very exciting, but also blindingly fast. If you want to get news about the book and other projects, please sign up for my mailing list:
#mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; }
/* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block.
We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */
Subscribe to my mailing list
* indicates required
Email Format
(function($) {window.fnames = new Array(); window.ftypes = new Array();fnames[0]=’EMAIL’;ftypes[0]=’email’;fnames[1]=’FNAME’;ftypes[1]=’text’;fnames[2]=’LNAME’;ftypes[2]=’text’;}(jQuery));var $mcj = jQuery.noConflict(true);
Meanwhile, I’m working away on two book projects, one a YA novel, the other Book 2 of the Tabat Quartet, HEARTS OF TABAT. It picks up halfway through BEASTS OF TABAT and involves three of the secondary characters. Book 3, EXILES OF TABAT, will take up the characters from BEASTS OF TABAT again at the point where BEASTS leaves off. Book 4, GODS OF TABAT, is plotted but I’m still figuring out the viewpoint stuff.
One of the viewpoint characters of HEARTS OF TABAT is Adelina, Bella’s former lover and closest friend. I’ve been writing about her this morning:
Adelina knew that in producing only one child, Emiliana had replicated the structure of the family from which she’d come. She wondered sometimes if her mother ever had, like Adelina, wished for a sister. What would it be like to have another soul that knew all the peculiar circumstances of your family existence, the conglomeration of odd relatives and circumstances and situations but more than anything, knew all the little sore spots that the world insisted on imposing, like the way her mother could, with a single look, indicate so much disapproval of an outfit.
Adelina straightened her shoulders. This was the first time she’d appeared in front of her mother wearing the cut and device of a Publisher, the open pages of a book, edged in the gold lines that indicated she was the head of a house. There were only five people in Tabat qualified to wear that device, but Emiliana refused to see any distinction in that. A house that worked in paper was lower status than one that worked in metal, let allow the heights that a banking house like the Nettlepurses were at. In Emiliana’s eyes, Adelina had stripped herself of all that, had stepped down into what was for Emiliana the equivalent of a puddle of shit when compared to the rarefied heights she had been born into.
Adelina imagined a sister standing beside her, whispering in her ear, “It’s all right. She doesn’t understand what an advantage such an outlet could be to a banking house.” A sister would have been willing to take the reins of the Nettlepurses and work together with Spinner Press, taking advantage of all that the two could offer each other.
But that was the other part of Emiliana’s disappointment. There were others who could take Adelina’s role, certainly, but they were all of distant blood, rather than her child.
And while Adelina could argue the advantages of her having formed the publishing house over and over again, she couldn’t argue with that disappointment, the real reason that underlay the look Emiliana gave Adelina as she came into the breakfast room.
But Emiliana said nothing, only offered a sharp nod of greeting, and returned her attention to the newssheets in her hands, the accounts of the morning arrivals at the docks, which ships carrying what, traveling mainly from the Southern Isles or elsewhere on the coast, but sometimes from the Old Continent or even places like the Rose Kingdom or the Winterlands.
In other news, I’ll be speaking briefly at an animated short films presentation that’s part of the Seattle Asian-American Film Festival on February 14th. See the Supernatural Seattle blog for details, and follow it on Twitter in order to get news of events and posts as they appear.
