TSP: An Index to 2018 Author Posts on The Story Prize blog (The Final Year of These)

Hit Leaders: Broughman and Blakeslee

Last year, for the ninth straight year, we invited every author of a book entered for The Story Prize to contribute a guest post to this blog, and 39 chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 538 guest posts from 515 different writers (some have contributed in more than one year). Here we are providing an index of the 2018 posts. Links to indexes for 2012-2017 are at the bottom of this post, as are links to the first two years of guest posts, 2010 and 2011.

It's been fun while it lasted, but because of steady declines in both author participation and the audience for these blog posts, 2018 will be the final year of this series. In its place, we hope to offer an opportunity for authors whose books we read in 2019 to contribute an image that relates to their collection, along with a short paragraph or two about the image, that we'll post on The Story Prize Instagram account.

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2018 author guest posts received 250 or more page views, down from an average of 400 last year. The most popular post, Chad V. Broughman on Being a Writer and a Parent, has so far drawn nearly 2,000 page views. Last year's leader, Karen Shepard: How to Make Intermittent and Erratic Progress as a Writer, in Twenty-Eight Easy Steps, had more than 4,500 page views—the sixth most of any TSP blog post, at the time (It is now the fourth most popular post, with almost 7,000 page views). Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules, the post with the most all-time views, currently has well over 14,000 page views.

The 2018 author contribution with the second most hits was Vanessa Blakeslee's Eight Most Anticipated 2018 Story Collections, with close to 1,000 page views to date. The two posts with the largest Facebook reach were Chad V. Broughman's and John Mort on Writing Short Stories and Raising Vegetables.

Here's the index for 2018.

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