Readers and writers blog

And now, a little self-congratulatory celebration. Because as of tomorrow, we’re 1. No, not No. 1. That would be a little too self-congratulatory. No, R&W Blog is 1, as in one year old.

As for our number in the blogosphere, well, that’s somewhere around 395,000. Which, considering that Technorati says it’s now tracking 112 million weblogs, isn’t as bad as it might sound.*

Our biggest surprise after our first year, although we haven’t set any readership records, is that we seem to have tapped into a growing Internet phenomenon — the e-book-in-progress.

More about that in a minute, but first, a little backstory.

The year got off to a slow start. Because, actually, the website Readers and Writers is now a year and a half old, and it took us six months to realize that we needed to add a blog or — and here’s another water metaphor to add to the one we led with Sunday — go under.

Our first blog entries were April 18, 2007, but they were just excerpts from my book, Adrift in America (which you can still conveniently find on this site by clicking on the aforementioned title). It took us three more days — April 21 — before we said hello as bloggers and started explaining ourselves:

Here is the whole idea: Amid the explosion of websites and weblogs in recent years, much of it dedicated to the type of personal chatter you hear on cellphones these days, it occurred to us that someone should put up a website dedicated to that passion so many of us bear — the passion to write, along with its corollary, the curiosity to read what others are writing — that would be free and unlimited. To be fair, there are many fine sites and blogs dedicated to the free part, but very few to the unlimited. Well, Readers and Writers Blog is unlimited.

That entry also quoted a gentleman we consider our predecessor, an Internet pioneer named David Guest who 10 years earlier had put up a website also called Readers and Writers. Although he used a slightly different URL, the purpose was the same — to give writers a place to publish their works for readers to read free.

“The site never took off,” he told us. “Writers all seemed to want to earn money from their efforts and were afraid to put their works in the public domain . . . (and so) I just let the site sort of die.”

Well, things have changed, and it seems to have happened in the last year or so.

For us, it all broke in February when a nice guy from Montreal, writer Steve Karmazenuk, sent us a note that he’d like us to run the first four chapters of his science fiction novel, The Unearthing. Right out of the blue. For free.

Then along came Joseph Cigan, a nice guy from Chicago who makes his living as an independent trade contractor but had done some writing and wanted to try his first novel. It wasn’t finished, but when we saw the first few chapters of Sniper in the Mist, we knew we had to serialize it.

Our first e-book-in-progress.

Then Karmazenuk came along after talking with some of his web-savvy friends and advisers and said he’d decided to release all of The Unearthing on our site. Wow. So we’re serializing that.

Then along came Gerard Jones, a nice guy (well, he’s a little curmudgeonly but a pussycat at heart) from Ashland, Ore., who not only let us serialize his book, Ginny Good, but gave us a link to free audio copies of it.

And now comes Jeri Cafesin, a nice woman (I just couldn’t keep the parallel with ‘guys’ and call her a ‘gal,’ sorry, that’s too Texas) from the San Francisco area who’s sending us chapters of her novel, Disconnected — yes, also an e-book-in-progress.

So check out the latest installments — Karmazenuk’s Chapter Eleven: Crisis, Cigan’s Chapter 7: Tsunami in Heaven and Jones’ Chapter Four: Fifteen Mile — as well the other writers in nonfiction, fiction and poetry, some of whom I haven’t mentioned, but bless them all.

One more note about our place in the blogosphere. Our number, 395,000, has stayed about the same in the past six months or so, and since Technorati estimates that’s about the same amount of time in which the total number of blogs usually doubles, R&W Blog seems to be doing all right.

If you’ll forgive one more aquatic metaphor, we may be treading water but the sea is rising to new levels. And so we float off into another year.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*Actually, a more realistic total might be between 1.5 million and 3.5 million, which still would put R&W Blog in the upper 25th to 10th percentile. It could be even higher, depending on who’s counting what. It’s not clear to me whether the Technorati figure of 112 million includes inactive as well as active blogs — and whether it’s blogs in all languages or just English, which is only about a third of the worldwide total. (A surprising statistic in the latest annual report by Technorati CEO David Sifry is that the largest number of blogs worldwide are written not in English or Chinese but Japanese.)