Kaput Except for the Tailspin

Well, I think this is it, folks. I'm calling it quits. I've maintained this site for nigh on eight years now. I thought getting it into Blogger would re-energize me, and it did for a short time, but the energy is gone. I'm putting my blogging efforts into www.EasilyDiscouragedMan.com, my other blog.

Now I never expected much to happen with this Colorado speculative fiction site, but I did think I'd get a couple hundred visitors a day. Never came close. I averaged probably between 4 to 10 hits a day. Total. Ten people stopping by on a good day. Many of them were the writers I just blogged about seeing what I'd written, rarely to return. Other hits were random searches for Colorado conventions and the like. I'm glad I was able to provide some information about that. I knew this was a very niche topic to cover, but I didn't think it was this niche, as in all but nonexistent. There's a pretty large group of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery fans in Colorado and I thought they'd start to show up. Didn't happen. I know that's my fault. I obviously didn't market the site appropriately. That's something I'm really bad about. I don't know how to market and I don't know where to market. So I did marketing attempts, but I certainly had no marketing plan. And I just didn't do a good job of it.

Part of my hope was that writers would feed me information. That the site would become a dynamic collection of writer news and events, getting a lot of locals involved. I thought it might be some kind of social "network." But as you can see from the huge number of comments (i.e., less that six, I think?), not many were interested in this type of interaction on this site. Perhaps the whole concept and design of this site is wrong. I don't know. But writers rarely fed me information and I've finally grown tired of the work involved in digging up that information on my own without anyone coming to view it. If I had started getting those couple-of-hundred visitors a day I think I'd still be interested in doing this as that's a nice-sized community. But this site never became a community. It never even became a coffee klatsch.

The irony (I think it's irony, that's one of those concepts that still eludes me) is that hardly anyone is going to read (or care) about this post or that the site is gone. I and maybe one or two other people are going to be sad to see this go. Now that's sad.

I'll probably keep all the information here. A static history. I don't see any point in deleting it and I still use this site for other things behind the scenes. But if you are one of the very few to read this post and be saddened by it, then thanks. Please stop by my other blog and say hello.

And with that I say goodbye.