5th Blog Anniversary – 5 year celebration with giveaways

Good Afternoon everyone,

I hope you’re all having a good day.  Today is a very special day for me because it is From Pemberley to Milton’s 5th year anniversary. I can’t believe it’s been this long since I started this wonderful hobby, and the blog and this community have become such an important part of my life, and allowed me to meet so many wonderful people I’ve come to consider friends, that I thought the five year mark deserved a big celebration!

With that in mind, on its 5th anniversary, we will have at From Pemberley to Milton 5 different post during the next 5 days with giveaways everyday! This blog would not exist without all of you, so I think you all deserve some goodies for your continuing support 🙂

Today I decided to let you know what I have been doing over the past 5 years, so I gathered some stats that I hope you find interesting. Tomorrow we will place 5 questions to the first 5 authors featured on From Pemberley to Milton back in 2015. On Wednesday I’ll share with you my top 5 North & South books, and on Thursday I’ll go through my Jane Austen Road Trip posts, pick my top 5 moments and present to you a new blog layout! I’ve been wanting to change the layout for some time because I want to add specific information about audiobooks that I’m reviewing, and to allow you to re-check old reviews in a more friendly and organized manner, so even though I’m super scared of losing everything I’ve built so far, on Thursday I’ll change the blog layout and add additional pages, etc. Wish me luck!

Finally on Friday I will share with you your own stats! If you’re willing, I will ask you to fill a anonymous survey that will allow me to understand the trend amongst my readers, and share all that data with you on Friday. Won’t it be interesting to see what other people like and dislike in the genre?

What do you think? Sounds good? I am a little scared with the layout change, but I hope all goes well and that you will like what’s coming.

Because today is the Blog Anniversary, I thought it would be best to start by sharing what I’ve been doing for the past five years, so I gathered the numbers of all my published posts and reviews and created some graphics to share with you. I confess I wasn’t too surprised with the numbers.

2015 was the debut year, and because I only started in August, it is natural to have a lower number of posts that year. Then we start to see an increase of published content with the big boom being 2017 (you remember what we were celebrating that year don’t you?). After 2017 we’ve been seeing a decrease, and that is due to 2 factors. First I started publishing less giveaway winners announcements, congregating several winners in one single post (you may not believe it, but it makes a huge difference). I realized it was preferable to have less content being published, but more appealing to all of you, so instead of focusing on the quantity of posts, I’m trying to make it about the quality. The second reason for this decrease was my ” I need to read something else phase” in 2019. If you’ve been following the blog for some time you’ve probably noticed that last year I took a break from JAFF. I needed to read something else and clear my mind to be able to appreciate these stories once more, so for a couple of months I didn’t publish that much, and I think that will always be my worse blogging year 🙂 As for this year, well… we are only in the beginning of  August, so it is natural to have a smaller number of posts published so far. I’m expecting the number to go up and stay close to 100. I’ll try to keep my commitment of posting twice a week, I think that’s the ideal number both for me and for you (you wouldn’t read my posts if I published everyday, right?).

The number of reviews published follows the same trend as the number of posts, but looking at the numbers, I can’t say I’m too happy about it. I will try to increase the number of reviews to 48 per year and keep that number steady. That will mean reviewing one book each week, leaving my second weekly post to guest posts, interviews etc. What do you think? Sounds good or are you ok with an inferior number of reviews as long as that means more contact with authors?

We’ve seen how many posts I’ve been publishing per year, but what about the type of post I’ve been publishing the most? Well, here it is an analysis of that per year.

In the first years of the blog, the topic Other Matters was one of the type of posts I published the most, but its number started decreasing over the years and that is because I became a little bit more organized (or so I hope).  This topic includes giveaway winners announcements, any special type of announcement like books re-releases, identity reveals, big sales I discovered online etc, and I’ve been trying to reduce them as much as I can, namely by announcing the giveaway winners in bulk instead of one announcement per winner.

But if we disregard that topic, which I’m really trying to reduce, you can see that except for 2019, reviews were the type of post I published the most every single year. As explained before that was the year when I decided to read more non-jaff books, so the number of reviews decreased. That was also reflected on my 2019 favourite books list which included for the first time some non-jaff books.

Then we can see I started out without any cover reveals or guest posts in 2015, but the number concerning these type of posts started growing a lot, especially the excerpts that reached its peak in 2019. Which leads me to a question, is this your prefered type of post apart from reviews? Or do you prefer other types of posts? The author interview posts for example haven’t been too steady over the years, and I wonder if this is something you would like to see published more often.

2020 has been the big year of Cover Reveals, and because of my love for covers, I admit this is one of my favourite posts to publish 🙂

My Jane Austen Road Trip posts had its peak in 2017 for obvious reasons, and are non-existent in 2020 but I hope to resume them in 2021. Unfortunately I cannot promise to do any other this year 😦

Apart from my blogging activity, I’ve also decided to see what I’ve been doing in terms of reading, and the numbers weren’t a shock either.

As you can see above, I mainly read Pride and Prejudice inspired novels, followed by North and South.

You’ll only see Persuasion, which is my second favourite Austen novel, and books which have characters from more than one novel, after the two books which inspired the name of this blog. What about you? Apart from P&P, which is you favourite?

I started out by reading only Pride and Prejudice inspired books, and I think that will always be my favourite, but I am now starting to widen my horizons and read works inspired by other works of Austen. The same is happening with regards to the sub-genre I read. Let’s take a look:

Overall, and for the past 10 years (I started reading JAFF in 2010), variations are the sub genre I read the most. I started out by only reading variations because they were my favourites, and in the beginning I would only read regency stories. With time, and after having read many, I decided something new was needed to keep my interest, so I started reading modernizations and stories placed in a  different era (for statistical purposes I’m considering everything that is non regency in the different eras category). After that, I also started reading stories which would focus on secondary characters, and mash ups are a little more recent but one of my favourite sub genres. I find that my taste in JAFF has changed over the years, so I’ll continue counting the type of books I read, because something tells me that in a few years this graphic may be very different 🙂 What about you? Have your tastes changed over time too? Which is your favourite sub genre? What about the plot? Which is your favourite? 

I would love to know all about that, and for that I’ve created this small survey. If you don’t mind answering, I’ll compile all your answers and publish them on Friday 🙂 I hope you don’t mind doing it because your participation will be crucial for Friday’s post 🙂

Please don’t forget, you can only choose one option. If the right answer isn’t available, you can write on the Other tag. I’m sure I missed many of your favourite and least favourite plots, but if you write them down, I’ll compile them and add them to the graphics that will be published next week. Also, if there is any question you’d like to know the answer, let me know, if I’m missing any important one, I can still add them during the week 🙂

If you’re not able to see the survey above, try switching your browser, some browsers are not showing it, but Microsoft Edge seems to work 🙂

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I feel I’ve written too much today and that I’ve bored you, but to compensate you, I have a giveaway coming up 🙂

Today will giveaway to one of my readers the following:

1 Pillow – Reading is always a good idea

1 pair of Jane Austen’s earings

1 necklace – So many books so little time

1 bracelet – If a book is well written I always find it too short

The giveaway is international and to enter it all you have to do is fill in the survey and comment on this post saying you’ve done so. I have also created a Facebook Page for From Pemberley to Milton where I will start sharing the blogs posts and news, so if you’d like to have a second entry in the giveaway follow the page and let me know in the comments you are already following. 

This is the first of many giveaways we’ll have here this week, and it will only be open until next Saturday as all winners for all giveaways will be announced next Sunday.

Good Luck everyone!