In case you’re not familiar with my “The Best and Worst of…” series, here’s the deal: every month I reflect on my statistics and tell you the top 5 most viewed posts and the top 5 least viewed posts—the best and worst of that month.  So what was popular and what wasn’t in August?  Well, here are the top 5 articles and reviews (site announcements are not counted) for August:

1.  The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

2.  The Giver by Lois Lowry

3.  The Hunger Games and Ancient Rome

4.  Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

5.  Matilda by Roald Dahl

Although school doesn’t start until September 4 here in Saskatchewan, in some places in America (where most of my traffic is from) it has already been in session for a few weeks.  This is why all of my top posts seem to be from students doing homework research for novel study as all four of the books listed here are typical novel study novels.

School being back in session is also why my overall traffic is up from 4, 350 views in July (when everyone is on vacation) to 4, 846 in August (a larger spike than I predicted).  It helps that I broke a personal record for views per day, which now stands at 305.  That doesn’t sound like much and really, it isn’t, but it smashed my old record of 246 views in one day.  The weirdest part of that record?  It was broken on a Thursday, which is traditionally one of my worst days for traffic, aside from Sundays.

Well, enough about views per day, let’s bring on the five worst posts of August!

1.  The Bad Queen by Carolyn Meyer

2.  YA Release Dates to Look Forward to

3.  Emperor: The Field of Swords by Conn Iggulden

4.  Some Thoughts on the YA Genre

5.  Isabel: Jewel of Castilla by Carolyn Meyer

I’m not surprised at all to see two Carolyn Meyer books on the bottom 5 because despite being a great historical fiction writer, her popularity has waned over the years.  ‘Ya Release Dates to Look Forward to’ is no surprise either because most of the dates listed are now irrelevant as the books have been released by now!

‘Some Thoughts on the YA Genre’ is sort of misleading at #4 because although it didn’t gather many views here on my blog, Mark over at The Masquerade Crew used it as a syndicated post and soon my timeline was flooded with people tweeting about it.  I assume that at least half of the people tweeting about it actually read it, so that’s more than enough to put it out of the bottom 5.

Well, that’s it for August!  My overall traffic is up now and I expect it to spike again as pretty much all schools will be in session at the end of the long weekend.  September will also feature more guest posting than usual because Caleb from 20four12 and I have worked out an arrangement that sees us guest posting for each other every other Friday.  My first post for him will be on September 7, then he will post for me on the 14th and so on and so forth.

If you’re looking to guest post for The Mad Reviewer, please read this article.  I look forward to hearing from you soon!