Fantasy-Faction Milestone

So, initially this started out as a forum private message to a blogger who asked:
“How did Fantasy-Faction get so big?”

I started typing, but in the end I decided to put it on the main page as I think that ‘you’, yes ‘you’, the person reading this piece right now deserves to know how much I (and the staff of Fantasy-Faction) appreciate you and how ‘you’ have made this website what it is today. Today seems an appropriate time to do this, because yesterday was the first day we’ve ever hit a number as high as ‘4000 hits’ in 24 hours.

Let me begin by saying that the past sixteen months have been the very best of my life. In November 2010 I got pretty badly injured – slammed on my back during a cage fight – and was unable to continue participating in the sport that I loved. So, sitting at home, with nothing to do, I decided to pick up a fantasy novel and instantly I was hooked. That book was ‘The Way of The Shadows’ by Brent Weeks and quickly I realised this was a genre I needed to really take notice of. So, feeling a bit bored and lonely at home, I decided to set up a blog where I would chuck a post up once a week – this would be a review of the book I’d read. Initially, I set up a blogger account, but quickly I wanted a cool name and extension, so I went with Fantasy-Faction and paid for some hosting and a domain name.

The date is now about 1st December, 2010. I have a blog site running, it has been up about a week and I contact a fellow blogger who tells me they have had over 100 hits in a day a few times. I am shocked to hear that on any day of the week 100 people would visit a blog site to read peoples reviews and set my aim to one day achieve 50 hits. I’m prepared to wait.

Amazingly, we hit 50 hits around the end of December (I think we did it twice). I was blown away – literally I couldn’t believe that 50 people, like you, were sitting at their computers reading my reviews. So, I set up a Twitter account and decided to speak with these crazy people and ask them why they were reading my reviews and they seemed to just generally appreciate my opinion. So, then came a few requests – people began asking for articles and more reviews. Now, obviously, that was a great idea! I’d love to write articles and do more reviews – however, there are only so many hours in the day and working full time, with university part time – it just wasn’t doable. So, I ‘tweeted’ and asked if anyone would like to help me with Fantasy-Faction.

To my amazement I had about 10 people e-mailed me and offer to help (I think Jennie – Autumn2May, Leo Cristea, Amy Rose Davis and Chris Becker were the ones who I decided would be great to help out). Between us, we were getting an article up about every other day and it seemed that the publishers were taking notice, because in January 2011 I was invited by Jon Weir of Gollancz (who is now a good friend of mine) if I would like to interview Joe Abercrombie. Having literally just burnt through his First Law Trilogy I of course agreed (I think I did some kind of unmanly yelp in excitement too). So, I interviewed Joe and got it up on the site about a week later.

That is when things really began to take of for Fantasy-Faction. Having Joe Abercrombie and the guys at Gollancz post a link to our website of course exposed us to a new number of fantasy fans (I think we had about 700 for Joe’s interview initially), but the thing was – people checked out our other articles, liked what they saw and decided to stick around. By February you can see, things have begun to get busy:

I think this was when we first started getting bandwidth issues. I’d wake up and have a ‘you have exceeded your bandwidth limit’ type e-mail from my host who would charge me a certain amount of money per megabyte I went over *shakes head*. Obviously, we were doing something right, so we just continued doing what we were doing and sent out another round of e-mails for more staff. It took quite a while, but we achieved our aim. We wanted to get at least one post a day (either an article, interview or review) up online, so that fantasy fans could wake up in the morning, grab a coffee and head over to our site to get their daily done of fantasy reading… they could actually do it during their lunch hour or after tea too… I just liked the idea that it was the first thing they done in the morning 

So, with the absolute best team of staff that I could possibly image… Fantasy-Faction was publishing an article a day and pretty much everything we put out there was being retweeted by people such as SFSignal, Gollancz, Orbit, Tor and various other big name publishers/fantasy bloggers – it was a really, really exciting time for us and literally momentum just kept on going and going and going. In fact, if you look at our analytics page – although things are a little bit stagged – the general trend is quite apparent:

(I should point out that the HIT COUNTS don’t include the forum)

With Fantasy-Faction growing we wanted to give more and more back to the people who were visiting us. We quickly set up a forum for fantasy fans across the world to converse, a book club, a writing group and most recently we’ve launch a fantasy writing contest, announced our upcoming anthology and launched a podcast too! Although ‘we’ as a team have made these things, they would never have been made if it wasn’t for you guys who kept visiting our site and giving us a reason to provide them. For example, you simply couldn’t have a podcast that no one listened to (I think we’ve had around 3400 listeners for the two episodes we’ve published), you couldn’t have a writing contest or anthology if people weren’t interested in entering (in 30 days we had over 200 entries and there is still over 100 days left to enter).

So yes, back to the point of this article; thank you. When I first set up Fantasy-Faction I never imagined I’d meet the kind of people I’ve met. From people who shared my passion for fantasy on the forums, over Twitter and even just in the comments through to authors who I admire such as Brandon Sanderson, Peter V. Brett, Scott Lynch, Mark Lawrence, Douglas Hulick, Joe Abercrombie and so, so many more – it’s been pretty incredible. I would also like to say that the people who work in publishing are some of the kindest, friendliest, most driven people I have ever met and I couldn’t imagine not knowing some of them now I look back.

The word ‘Faction’ is hugely appropriate: “A group of people who express a shared belief or opinion different from people who are not part of the group”. I think this expresses the fantasy community pretty well and certainly, I see Fantasy-Faction as ‘a group’ – each and every person who visits the site is part of it and because of you guys we are inspired to continue writing articles, reviews and convincing authors to give up their time and do these lengthy interviews with us.

I hope you guys will keep visiting, helping us grow and allowing us to do the things we love. In return, we promise we’ll keep reading, reviewing, blogging and interviewing. So, once more – Thank you guys! 

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