I just got word that my short story “The Skull-Faced Boy,” which will be appearing later this year in the anthology The Living Dead (edited by John Joseph Adams), will also be appearing on the Pseudopod horror fiction podcast. Pseudopod did a really nice job with the last story of mine that they ran, “The Disciple,” so go check that out if you’re so inclined.
I was just glancing at the Escape Pod message board, and I noticed that the topic for my story “Blood of Virgins” has received the most page views of any story over there. I figured, well, it’s one of the oldest stories, so it’s had the most time to accrue views, and it was a somewhat controversial story, so that probably inflated the count, and it also probably gets a lot of visits from the same pervs who constantly barrage my website with google searches on variations of “blood sex video virgins first time.” So I didn’t think much of it. But then I noticed that my story “Save Me Plz” is right up there too, as the fourth most-viewed. “Save Me Plz” is relatively recent, was not particularly controversial, and is much less likely to draw in the sex-fiend traffic. So then I popped over to the Pseudopod message board and noticed that my story “The Disciple” has the most page views of any story over there. Okay, so that definitely seems to be a pattern. I hope it means that my stories are attracting a lot of interest from readers, but I’m really not sure how meaningful the “page views” thing is or how to interpret it. I do note that the second and third most-viewed topics on the Escape Pod board are for “The 43 Antarean Dynasties” by Mike Resnick and “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, both Hugo Award-winning stories, so that does seem to indicate that there’s at least some correlation between page views and how well a story is being received.
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