I’ve had almost 2 full weeks of not posting, and it’s been excellent. It has allowed me to finish a lot of stuff — renovations to the site, visible and invisible, a big books that I’d been stalled on (The Magic Mountain), and build up a bit of a backlog so the quality of the posts will be higher, and maybe even more frequent.
Here are 5 things I learned in the past couple of weeks (and months):
Less is more: Books
Goodreads tells me I read 155 books this year. That’s much less than prior three years (258 in 2021, 219 in 2022, and 252 last year), and it’s excellent. One of my goals for 2024 was to read less, but more carefully and thoughfully. Writing reviews for this website helped that too, especially writing about books that didn’t work for me. I’m definitely a better reader than I was last year.
I have some new ideas to make the book reviews shorter, better, and more useful.
More is less: Music
I published 177 posts about music this year. I probably wrote another 25 that never got published for one reason or another. On top of that, the posts got longer as the year went on, but they didn’t get better.
The playlists got more padded as the year wore on too. There was a lot of insipid stuff on the Friday playlists, especially toward the end of the year.
I plan to fix both of those in 2025. Short entertaining and memorable music posts (hopefully). More to come later this week.
Learning to trust my instincts, sometimes
A lot of the changes I waffled about seem smart and obvious in hindsight – and the stakes are so low that experimenting has no downside. For example: I didn’t start doing single-artist music posts until May, and even that was after a couple weeks of hemming and hawing.
On the other hand, I often spent hours or days on a task or post or idea that wasn’t a good fit for the site, and wound up being scrapped. Hate that.
Why? I think it’s a mix of lacking a clear mandate and (self-imposed, pointless) pressure to publish stuff. More to come on that later this week.
Convincing you to hang around (or come back)
Only about half my traffic comes in through the homepage. The rest comes in through google searches or social posts, to specific book or music pages. And while returning visitors are increasing, I’ve been working to figure out how to get them to stick around, to discover more music or to sign up for the newsletter. In late 2024 I added the ‘popular stuff’ column to the right side of all the posts, and it turned out to be an excellent tool for retention. I’m going to be building off that in 2025.
About that newsletter
I’m still not convinced that newsletters are the way of the future. I don’t even subscribe to Substack newsletters, I use Feedly and RSS for them. Even still, there are a good number of people that have opted to receive mine. It’s a small audience, but the data shows it’s an engaged one. So I want to make that much better. In 2024 there were a bunch of low-value things in it that took a lot of time, which stole energy that could go to making the thing much better. So sign up for it if you haven’t.
Got feedback? Let me know.
