It’s Friday and after a long time I’m back with another Let’s Talk Bookish Post! However, I’ve gone rogue quite a bit, because I swapped this week’s topic and next week’s topic as this feels more natural to me. I just want to wrap up 2024 now and not next week. So today, I won’t be talking about my first read of 2025, but I’ll post my 2024 reading and blogging wrap up instead. Yes, I also added the blogging part. Without further ado, let’s have a look! Sorry not sorry, but long post ahead!
Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted by Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Since April 2022, the meme moved to another host, Aria @ Book Nook Bits. Let’s Talk Bookish is a meme where participants discuss certain topics, share their opinions, and share their love by visiting each other’s posts.
Prompts: What were the best books you read in 2024? Any disappointments? Did you meet your reading goals? Did you read any 2024 releases? Did you discover any new favorite authors? Tell us all about your most memorable reads of the year!
Reading
Okay, I’ll go rogue yet again, because I posted my favourite reads of the year in a Top Ten Tuesday post on December 31 already. All in all, 2024 has been a good reading year. I’ve set my reading goal at 50 books, because I didn’t want the pressure I felt in 2023. That was by far my worst reading year of the past few years, and I felt pressured to meet my reading goal. This got me into a huge reading slump. So, I didn’t want this in 2024 and therefore set my goal quite low. I knew I would easily meet it, and I actually ended up exceeding it by reading 121 books. Most were good, but others weren’t. In February, March and August I read the most books, 13 in each respective month. November was bad with just 5 books read and I hardly enjoyed any of these. I rated 14 books 5 stars in the end:
- Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas
- Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas
- Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas
- Queen of Shadows by Sarah J. Maas
- Empire of Storms by Sarah J. Maas
- House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas
- Jade War by Fonda Lee
- Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee
- Lady of Darkness by Melissa K. Roehrich
- Lady of Shadows by Melissa K. Roehrich
- Lady of Ashes by Melissa K. Roehrich
- Lady of Embers by Melissa K. Roehrich
- Lady of Starfire by Melissa K. Roehrich
- Amari and the Despicable Wonders by B.B.Alston
Unfortunately, I had to DNF 7 books, you can find all about them in this post. There are several books that surprised me, e.g. Dearest Clementine by Lex Martin, The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson and The Cheat Sheet by Sarah Adams. And there where are surprises and favourites, there where also disappointing reads. Some of these are Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli, Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi and The Songbird and the Heart of Stone by Carissa Broadbent.
As I already stated, I’ve read 121 books. These books were divided into 40,505 pages and 355.23 hours of audiobooks. 2024 Was the year I listened to more audiobooks than ever! The average time for me to finish a book was 4 days and my average rating of the year is 3.38 stars. Not bad!
I also wanted to reread the entire “Throne of Glass” series by Sarah J. Maas in English. In 2018, I read all books in Dutch, Kingdom of Ash excepted. I had a kickstart with this goal in January but slacked on it in July. Empire of Storms took me so long to finish, I’m not much of a fantasy reader in summer. However, I totally forgot to pick up the final two books after this, so I’m taking this goal with me into 2025.
Blogging
On the final days of 2023, I upgraded my blog to a semi self-hosted blog. I already had a domain, but I wanted to have some plugins to A) get more into SEO and B) create review indexes because my review archives were just one big mess. I succeeded on the review indexes but failed on SEO. I can’t find a SEO plugin that suits my needs and work properly at the same time, so I left that goal behind. I, however, saw a huge growth on my blog. In both number of posts and visitors! I wrote a total of 201 blogposts in 2024, and 30,695 visitors have found their way to my little corner on the internet. The most popular month on my blog was October. My visitors came from 10 different countries, with the United States as top contributor. My top 5 countries are all in the English-speaking world and are as follows:
- United States (19,629 visitors)
- United Kingdom (1,611 visitors)
- Canada (1,403 visitors)
- India (1,278 visitors)
- Australia (1,083 visitors)
As you can see, it’s all very tight, apart from the United States! My total page views in 2024 are 51,758 pages views. However, the average time people spent on my blog is 1 minute, so this is quite challenging and something I have to take into account. Either people read pretty fast, or my posts are too long. A third option is that people just do a quick scan and go on with their day.
People say that reviews don’t do so well lately. Funny, my top 5 pages (apart from my homepage) are all book reviews. Twisted Games, Twisted Hate, The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King and Reckless got the most views in 2024. The first review is not even written in 2024, it’s from July 2023.
Apart from the average time people spent on my website, the device they use is also something to take into consideration. It turns out most visitors use their phone (70%), followed by a desktop/laptop (27%). A tablet is used only by 2% of my visitors to browse my blog. Furthermore, social media doesn’t seem to gain much traffic anymore. Twitter used to be the main source for clicking through to blog posts, but that seems to be a thing of the past. Social media in general. My top referral is the WordPress reader, which doesn’t surprise me at all since I use this tool to read blogs myself as well.
I think 2024 was a very good year for my blog even though I didn’t go to many lengths in terms of promotion. People seem to find my blog and that’s great! I think participating in memes such as Let’s Talk Bookish – and probably even more – Top Ten Tuesday helps a lot. I’m a very satisfied blogger over here!
How was your reading and blogging year when looking into your 2024 stats?
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