Science writing one hit wonders

I'm in the process of transferring the Popular Science book review site (www.popularscience.co.uk) to a new home after getting fed up with Wordpress.

The old site (about the fourth incarnation since 2004), was hosted on my own website using Wordpress, but it was a nightmare to keep up to date. They kept updating Wordpress and its plugins with nauseating regularity, and I could never get the automatic updates to work, so had to update it by hand each time. For a while it has been close to the maximum memory my ISP allocates to a virtual server, and the latest version crashed through this so that it was impossible to update the site ever again.

One advantage of moving it to a new site is that I've taken the opportunity to add a couple of features missing from the Wordpress version, notably an alphabetical set of index pages by author. And what's quite surprising is how many one hit wonders there are. If you take a look, for instance, at the S authors, one of the more popular surname initial letters, out of 51 authors, only 6 have more than one book listed. (I am still updating the site, so there may be more by the time you read this.)

One interpretation of this is that popular science writers are primarily amateurs (at writing). Another is that most aren't very good. Or are very slow writers. Or didn't earn as much as they expected. (Or hated our review and wouldn't send another book in case that one was slated too.) All of the above, I suspect, and other reasons too. But interesting nonetheless.

Incidentally, the site is up for the UK blog awards. If you've got a few moments to spare, it would be great if you could pop along and vote for it! It should only take a few seconds.

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