Five years old and still growing! With the start of this New Year, Pens Around the World, our international, Internet-based writers’ group, starts its sixth year. (Three cheers!)
The Annual Round-up
This is John-the-Admin’s annual round-up of the year just gone. I hope there are things to interest everyone, but there may be sections you’d prefer to jump to directly. Feel free! As last year, here’s a handy summary with hot-links.
Directly below is an overview of Pens Around the World, the group. This is principally for people who are new to us. Following that is some encouragement to Join us, Subscribe to the website and Contact us with a view to writing us a guest blog post.
Then comes a section highlighting and thanking our three Guest Bloggers from 2025. Following that is a word or two about our forthcoming Anthology.
The next section looks at what the Statistics have to say about our website’s visitors. Then comes a ‘Top of the Pops’ list of blog posts by our members during the year and a top five of our all time most popular posts.
Finally greetings to a new member, an honourable mention, and some hopes for the coming year.
Pens Around the World (PATW)
Our members are scattered around the globe, from the USA to Singapore, and from Scotland’s northern isles and Scandinavia to the Mediterranean (and occasionally further afield). We meet virtually to offer one another support, encouragement and advice.
All of us are writers in various stages of our writing lives. All of us recognise the benefits we can get from sharing our writings and giving and receiving feedback and encouragement, tips and ideas. Some of us are in situations where local writing groups are difficult to find or participate in, especially in English. Many of us are living in countries different from where we started out. Some of us live peripatetic lives, while some are in isolated parts of the world.
Join us!
For all these reasons – and others – an online writers’ group is a great solution and we remain open to welcoming new members. You can apply to join us by filling out the form under Join Us in the top menu – or click here.
To learn more about what we do, take a look around the public sections of our website. And for a flavour of how we have developed over the last four years, why not read some of our previous annual round-ups? Here are the links:
Pens Around the World: 2021 and onward
Pens Around the World in 2022 – another year older
Pens Around the World in 2023… and going forward
Pens Around the World in 2024
Subscribe
Whether or not membership is something for you at present, we would be delighted to have you as a subscriber. Fill out the subscription form in the right hand margin. (On a mobile phone, find the form by scrolling down.)
As a subscriber you’ll get an e-mail notification when our weekly blog posts on life as a writer, the craft of writing, writing inspiration, etc. are published. Also, our subscribers get the first notice of new developments at PATW.
Guest bloggers
Last year’s series of bi-monthly guest blog posts continued into the first half of 2025. We were delighted to welcome back a couple of our former members as guest bloggers, as well as one new writer/blogger.
The new guest blogger was Norma Wong. Born in Hong Kong and now resident in Norway, Norma writes short stories. In Away from Home she wrote about the characters that populate her stories, and their different concepts of home.
Our two former member guests were Angela Williams (who lives in The Netherlands and also writes as Susan Carey), and Sue Borgersen (living in Newfoundland and writing as SJ Borgersen). Angela wrote us Creative Healing: How Writing Helped Me Live with Cancer. Sue shared her journey From Writer to Reader in 25 Years.
In June, in the Guest Blog spot, we published a shout-out to would-be guest bloggers that remains relevant. Read it here: Shout out! Guest bloggers, add your sparkle to our website!
Although we have suspended our Guest Blog slot for the time being, we are still very interested to publish guest bloggers. If you think you have a post you would like us to consider, please do pitch us your idea. Use this Contact form, also linked from the Shout out! blog post and from our main menu. (But, please: no AI-generated posts and no posts that are irrelevant to our area of interest.)
Our Anthology
An exciting development for Pens Around the World in 2025 has been our decision to collect some of the material from our website into an anthology. This project is on-going.
Our intention is to publish a selection of our writing. The anthology will include pieces we are particularly happy with, selected from among our public blog posts and from among our private writing. When it’s ready subscribers will be the first to know.
Perhaps this anthology is the harbinger of future publications to come. Members and subscribers may, in future, be invited to submit examples of their writing for publication. Subscribe to keep up to date with this project!
Some statistics
Visitors and views
During the first few years of the website we used a variety of analytical tools that, sadly, seem to have inflated our visitor figures. In 2025, for the first time, we used a more sober system. (It is also, unlike Google Analytics for example, strictly GDPR compliant).
The new system tells us that in 2026 we received nearly 3000 visitors. (I’m sorry that’s a very considerable drop from the c. 17,000 I trumpeted last year. However the numbers are much more reliable.) These 3000 visitors viewed posts and pages on the site over 5000 times in just under 4000 sessions.
The statistics also show that, on average, our visitors viewed a couple of different posts or pages each time they visited and they spent about 4½ minutes on the site for each visit they made. This is a good average for a blogging site.
Sources of visitors
The most common search engine channelling visitors to our site is Google. Google is followed by Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex, Ecosia, Brave and Yahoo (in descending order).
Baidu is a Chinese search engine and Yandex is Russian based, so I strongly suspect visits via both are more likely to come from bots or spammers. Though I’ve no way to prove that, a lot of our spam does seems to be Russian or East Asian in origin.
Once again, the only social network that sends us visitors is Facebook. (I glossed over that last year.)
A good deal of our other traffic seems to come directly. I mean, people type in addresses or, more likely, click on a link to a specific post. Perhaps these come via our subscription list and through having the site promoted by our guest bloggers.
It looks to me like some posts also attracted interest (via Google especially) because of certain keywords in the titles. (You’ll see what I mean below.)
Popular pages
As you’d expect, the most popular page to visit is our front page. This is followed by our main and secondary Forum pages, which are accessible only to members. This confirms that, though we are few in number, we are an active group.
Top of the pops in 2025
Probably more interesting to members is the story our statistics tell about interest in the blog posts we take in turns to write and publish weekly. In 2025 as in 2024, in every month where we published a guest’s blog post, that post topped the charts for visitors. This we expected. But here are our ‘home-grown’ chart toppers published in 2025
- In January the most viewed post was Rachel’s The Angel Looking Over Your Shoulder.
- In February it was Miriam’s Full Self-Publishing Services – Any Good?
- In March it was Michael’s Start Strong, End Stronger: The Power of Prologues & Epilogues.
- In April, Debbie’s Living in Dystopian Times attracted the most views.
- In May, Kimberly’s Coming of What Age? took the prize.
- In June, it was Jos’s Of Tangents and Time.
- In July, Nigel’s Taken with a Pinch of Salt, about Raynor Winn and the Salt Path controversy held the top spot.
- In August, Gail’s Writing Prompt Generator attracted a lot of attention.
- In September, Jos took the title again with Was Dickens Right?
- In October, the most viewed was John’s The Universal Turing Machine.
- In November, it was Gill’s Chronology.
- And last, in December it was Jos (again!) with You’d better get a move on, or else.
The annual results
The statistics also show cumulative results, and these give us a different top pop list. This time, not restricting ourselves to posts only published in 2025 or written by members alone, these are the top five posts on site in terms of visitors.
1. Writing Prompt Generator by Gail, published 25 August 2025
616 visitors (31% of all our visitors) | 690 views | av. view duration 1:48 minutes
(I suspect this astoundingly high score has much to do with the title. Search on the term “writing prompt generator” and see how many pages you find. It’s clearly a popular search term. Maybe we should try to rework other titles to see if we can bulk up visitor numbers?!)
2. A Comedy Prompt by Kimberly, published 3 March 2025
216 visitors (11% of all visitors) | 222 views | av. view duration 0:49 seconds
(A step down from Gail’s stratospheric numbers, but still pretty damn good!)
3. The Ultimate Novel Writing Course – My Experience by Angela Williams (guest blogger/former member), 19 December 2022
90 visitors | views 105 | av. view duration 7:59 minutes
(The continued success of this post is another object lesson in the value of incorporating words and phrases people are searching for on Google. Coupled with engaging content – hence the nearly 8 minutes average that readers spend on the post.)
4. Coming Home to a Far Off Place by Marsali Taylor (guest blogger), 2 Dec 2024
59 visitors | views 66 | av. view duration 4:44 minutes
5. Away from Home by Norma Wong (guest blogger), 4 Aug 2025
54 visitors | views 83 | av. view duration 3:56 minutes
And finally
In 2025 we welcomed one new member, Rebecca Clyburn, a Canadian writing from The Netherlands. Rebecca’s first blog post for us, on Accountability Partners, filled the first slot in December. It received 9 visitors, 13 views and was viewed for an average of 2:06 minutes.
Meanwhile Doug Forrest of Shetland, the new member we welcomed in 2024, published three blog posts in 2025. Of these, Words that come to life was most popular receiving 12 visitors and 24 views. It was viewed for an average of 1:18 minutes.
I don’t see any reason to change my prognosis from last year. If we set aside all the challenges outwith the scope of our world of writing and books (a big if, I grant you), then 2026 looks fairly cheerful for Pens Around the World. As last year, I am optimistic.
Thank you for reading this. My best wishes to you for your 2026.
Image acknowledgements
The distorted globe with pens scattered across it (also in the featured image) is a self-produced stock picture for Pens Around the World. Likewise “Hip Hip Hooray!” at the top of the post (though the original fireworks image comes from Wikimedia Commons). Also the collage of portraits of our guests in 2025 – made from the profile images we have for the three of them.
The picture at the top of Statistics is cropped down from a CC image on Pexels.com by fauxels. The image above of a puppet writer with his own printing press is another CC image, this one by popmelon via Pixabay.com.
Thanks John for an interesting and encouraging round-up! It reminds us that our writing efforts are worth it – connection is the most important human need, and PATW helps us connect with fellow writers and readers everywhere.
Hi Miriam, I’m glad you found it interesting. 🙂
Thanks, John, that was a great summary of our Pens year. And a big thanks to you for holding it all together!
Thanks Debbie. These reports seem to get longer with every passing year – but they are fun to write!