Got readers?: This is the web site traffic map from my deckerotica.com days, when I posted my short stories online under a pseudonym. The web site went live in 2002, and I have run a version of it ever since. The site you are visiting is its latest redux.

For this one month in 2009, my web site received 14,000  unique readers. And, as this one month shows, the site received an amazingly world wide readership. These are the days when Cybersocket.com hailed deckerotica “One of the 20 sexiest sites on the web.”

This means my previous estimates of having received at least half a million unique readers is very low. It is, in fact, wrong, and I will have to correct my mention of this information in the afterword to Inky Flesh.

If I isolate just the five years when the site averaged these kinds of numbers, deckerotica.com received nearly one million unique readers. If I consider the fact deckerotica.com was up and running for many more years than five, and there were months where the site received much higher traffic (from 54,000 to 79,000 visitors on some days), deckerotica.com clearly received way more than 1,000,000 visitors. I would  love to have one solid number for you, but the fact is, the web statistics has always been hard for me to wrap my mind around. Sadly, I should have done a much better job archiving all this information.

Sadly, this is one of those flashbacks that makes you rethink your life choices. Alas, pursuing the Ph.D. and a professorship took precedence. The good news is that I have a solid job that I love, which pays the bills for this web site today. And, I have at least two books and many more stories and ideas ready to go. The next step will begin with Inky Flesh: Stories Written by the Body, which will be published this fall.

Who knows how Inky Flesh will do. I will tell you this: the Internet is a very different business nowadays. These days, everyone is on social media. So, I will need each of you to buy 1,000 books, thanks.