graycardinal | Meme: AO3 Stats 2021 - New Year, Same Old Fic

The primary takeaway is that for the most part, this year's rankings are very, very similar to last year's (because there hasn't been all that much new verbiage since last May). As a result, rather than giving you all the lists all over again, the first thing I'm going to do is point you at last year's lists:

AO3 Stats Meme, 2020 Edition

That said, there has been one notable development:

By Any Other Name (Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer, ~1600 words)

I wrote this Enola Holmes story in summer 2018, for Holmestice, and it's seen a sizeable boost in traffic since the 2020 lists went up. This is clearly, of course, an artifact of the Netflix movie adaptation having been a roaring success. "By Any Other Name" went from below the top ten to #4 in number of hits, outdrawing everything save my most popular early Castle work. It also jumped from #6 to #1 in both number of kudos and number of bookmarks, and from #6 to #2 in number of subscriptions. (With respect to comment threads, the story didn't make the top ten either last year or this.)

Beyond this, there's not a lot to report. The drabble series collected in "Random Plot Twists" dropped off the bottom of a couple of categories, and a handful of works shifted one slot up or down, this last largely triggered by Enola's rise. One older story, Player Status: Offline, jumped from the bottom to the middle of the Kudos list - not entirely surprising, as it's a Carmen Sandiego story and the recent Netflix series has evidently led some readers to seek out fic from the '90s cartoon. Nor did any of my 2020 works break into a top ten rank in any category, though that's largely an artifact of the fandoms in question being mostly small to start with.

The one mildly curious non-change is that my other Enola Holmes story - The Women in the Case, which partners Enola with Mary Russell and a female character from Philip José Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer - didn't get anything like the bump its predecessor did. It did get quite a lot of hits by Holmestice standards, but to date it's gotten only about a third as many hits as the prior story, even though I've put them both under a series umbrella.

Ah, well. This year I have some hope of better productivity - speaking of which, my Unsent Letters deadline is creeping up....