Happy Birthday To Us

[image courtesy of Wessex Catering]
The Women of Mystery are officially a year old today. (Coincidentally, one of our most frequent commenters, Travis Erwin, celebrated his blog's first anniversary yesterday.)

I realized in the process of sending out queries, attending conferences, etc, that I needed a professional home on the web. I didn't have credentials to support a full on web page, but I figured a blog would be a way for all those agents and editors who Googled me to be shocked and awed by my writing skills. (Or not. Most likely not.) I'd kept a personal blog for years, but I knew I couldn't keep up a professional one on my own, so I reached out to the NY/Tri-State chapter of the Sisters in Crime, hoping someone--anyone--would want to join the fun.

And I found a wonderful, talented group of women. Our membership has changed a bit in the last twelve months, as was to be expected. We've had some people leave because life got in the way, while others joined. Membership is...fluid...here at WoM, and I remain hopeful that some of those who've faded out will return to full strength at some point.

Managing a group blog is wildly different from maintaining a personal one. We have a Yahoo mail group where we discuss such fascinating topics as:
- who doesn't have computer access this week (or month or six months) and won't be able to post
- who's going to post for My Town Monday
- whether we feel it necessary to post on a schedule
- whether something should go in the sidebar (moot for months now, since Blogger won't let me edit the page, and I'm too chicken to delete the template and start over)
. . . and other things that probably don't occur to anyone. When we started out, our one "rule" was that everything we wrote had to have some connection--no matter how tenuous--to the writing life. I think we've generally stuck to that.

I recently looked back at a post where I talked about how people had found us. That was seven months ago, and our traffic has basically doubled since then, but some things seem to hold steady. We still get an outsized number of hits for some posts that don't really relate to what I assume people want to know when they do their Google searches and for things that...don't apply to us. We still can't track how the majority of people come to us because they're coming directly, without following a link, or they are coming from mail programs where we have no idea what horrid things people are saying about us in their links! On the other hand, we do have a fair amount of information about contests, and people do seem to like to come to our site for that info. I think that's great...even if those very same people are our competition!

And it's been an exciting year for the Women of Mystery. In the past year, we've had members published, nominated for awards, find agents, finish a NaNoWriMo novel, gain the courage to send out queries, go on book tours...and always, grind away writing, writing, writing. Not bad.