With the start of this New Year, Pens Around the World, our international, Internet-based writers’ group, celebrates it’s fourth anniversary and the start of its fifth year. (Hurrah!)
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 cut to. Feel free! 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 thanking our six Guest Bloggers from 2024 (and one from 2023). The next section looks at what the Statistics have to say about our website’s visitors. (Spoiler: they are up more than 60% on 2023!) Then comes a ‘Top of the Pops‘ list of blog posts by our members during the year. And finally an honourable mention, greetings to a new member, and some hopes for the coming year.
Pens Around the World
With members scattered across the globe from the USA to Singapore, and from Scotland’s northern isles, Sweden and the south-west corner of England, to Spain, Germany and France, 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
Subscribe
If membership is not 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 the craft of writing, writing inspiration, etc. are published. Also, our subscribers get the first notice of new developments at PATW.
Guest bloggers
One exciting development last year was our series of bi-monthly guest blog posts. Our fantastic guest bloggers were a great success, drawing new eyes to our website and giving us new input. The current sequence began with Paddy Kelly’s On Giving Up Writing, towards the end of 2023.
In 2024 we welcomed six more. ‘Multi-hyphenate’ art professional Mirjam Frosth started February off for us with her post Connection, art, and the written word. She was followed in April by Scottish-Swedish author Ruth Tauber with a story of Finding a hyphen of her own. In June, Filipina author and editor Raissa Claire R. Falgui shared a post considering The Author as an Actor.
Our August guest was neuroscientist, teacher and Spanish language author Jimena Ferraris, who wrote The world around my pen. In October, Lisa Rose Wright, Galicia, Spain resident and author of the Writing Home trilogy of travelogue memoirs, described herself as The Accidental Author.
Our first year of guest blogs concluded with Shetland Sailing Mystery author Marsali Taylor and her piece, Coming home to a far off place.
We want to continue publishing guest blog posts in 2025. Would you like to write us one? If so, please drop us a line through our Contact form and pitch your idea!
Some statistics
Statistics (can) gladden the heart of a humble website administrator. Bear with me as I share a few choice items.
In 2022 the website received about 8000 visitors. In 2023 we welcomed around 10,500. Now, in 2024, visitor numbers are up above 17,000; an increase of more than 60% over 2023! I put this down, in part, to our guests – and I thank them for bringing more eyes to our website. I hope it also means we are becoming better known.
Many visitors come to us by referral and though I see Facebook in particular among the referrers (thank you, Facebook), I see more of Bing. I think this means some of the increase in our traffic comes from people following suggestions of the Bing search engine. This is a surprise – to me at any rate. In our statistics for 2024, Bing is clearly more popular than Google.
Far and away the most popular page to visit was our front page. This was 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. Visits to our Join us and our Contact us pages are also up, marginally.
Top of the pops in 2024
Probably more interesting to members is the story the statistics tell about interest in the blog posts we take it in turns to write and publish weekly. 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 in 2024.
- In January the most viewed post was Kimberly’s On Writing through Grief.
- In February it was Rachel’s Writing with passion and curiosity
- In March, Jos’s Wisdom, knowledge and tomatoes.
- In April, the top slot was shared between Gail’s Online pitch parties and Michael’s Upstairs downstairs books.
- In May, three posts shared top rankings: Rachel’s Life in the raw, Kimberly’s Getting what you want from writing groups and Nigel’s The good book.
- In June, the top spot was easily taken by Bruce’s republished post, Creative people.(Originally published in 2021.) It was visited almost as much as a guest post. The next ranked posts this month were Debbie’s Happily ever after and Jos’s Romeo & Juliet.
- In July, Michael’s Happy birthday to you and Gail’s Coping with the current publishing world were most popular.
- In August, it was Nigel’s Do you get full marks?
- In September, Miriam’s A writer’s workspace.
- In October, Bruce’s Remembering Buckminster Fuller shared the top spot with Gill’s The importance of artwork.
- In November, it was Rachel’s The black dog bites again.
- And in December Miriam’s Writing inhibitions.
And finally
An honourable mention. Although earlier posts do appear in the statistics, they are often quite low, visited only once or perhaps two or three times a year. This year I noticed one of our earlier guest posts getting more traction. Our former member, Angela Williams wrote us a guest post towards the end of 2022: The ultimate novel writing course: my experience. In 2024 that post attracted a noticeable interest in June, July and August.
In 2024 we welcomed one new member, Doug Forrest of Shetland. Look for his byline on blog posts in the coming year.
Setting aside the political, military, climate change and technological challenges – and more – that are obvious to us all in 2025, the year ahead for Pens Around the World looks fairly cheerful. I hope I’m justified in feeling optimistic. In any event, we ought to have plenty to write about.
Thank you for reading this. My best wishes to you for your 2025.
Image acknowledgements
The globe with pens around it (also in the featured image) is a self-produced stock image for Pens Around the World. The collage with portraits of our guest bloggers combines supplied publicity images with the previous picture.
The picture of a globe with handwritten page is by Jimena Farraris, an illustration for her guest post. The picture of statistics on a spreadsheet is by Lukas, via Pexel.com. The writer’s workspace image is by Bruce Dodson of his own desk and writing room, cluttered with objects and memories. The typewriter with ‘Stories matter’ is by Suzy Hazelwood via Pexels.com.
Well, that was quite a year. Thanks for the round up, John. And also thanks for all that you do in supporting the group.
Happy New Year to all our members and non-members. An especial thank-you to John who works so hard to keep this group active and interesting.
I can only reiterate the voices of my co-members. Sounds like we had a successful year. Many thanks to John for his knowhow and the time he invests!