Welcome to the December edition of the Book Notification newsletter! I hope everyone had a great holiday season with lots of reading-related gifts!
If you received anything unique not on our 10 Great Christmas Gift Ideas for Book Lovers list, be sure to let me know! I plan on expanding that list with many more ideas in the future to create the ultimate gift guide for readers.
The best book I read in December was You by Caroline Kepnes. I cannot stress this enough – if you’re going to read it, listen to it. The narrator, Santino Fontana, delivers the best performance I’ve heard from any audiobook I’ve listened to. I’d play random parts of the book for people, and they would be engrossed in it immediately. I honestly don’t think I would have enjoyed this book if I read it – but the narration was incredible.
Though I was aware of the Netflix adaptation of the book and series, I discovered it purely by chance. I was reading a Reddit thread on recommended mystery/thriller audiobooks. That one jumped out on the mentions, and I’m delighted I tried it. It’s always neat looking back at the ways we discover new books. Thank you /u/Narrow_Muscle9572, for your recommendation!
On the topic of book discovery, that’s something we are very excited about at Book Notification. We want to help you discover new books via a variety of methods. Personalized recommendations, of course, are one method. Quick surveys based on your current reading mood are another. But we have various other ideas planned, and I’m excited to announce that one of those features, Reader’s Roulette, has been launched today.
There are more details in the Site Improvements & Updates section. Suffice it to say, I spent a while beta testing it over the last few days, and I’ve discovered about 20 books that I’ve already marked as “Want To Read”!
We’ve spent a lot of time in December focusing on adding an efficient routine to social media content sharing. Our social media team have been hard at work, and the social media channels are seeing a lot of updates, so if you aren’t subscribed to any of them, be sure to follow us. We’ve recently added a Pinterest board and will be starting a podcast shortly covering the weekly new book releases. Here are all of our links:
Follow Us: Facebook | Twitter (X) | bSky | Instagram | Pinterest | reddit | TikTok
Last month, we held a contest where each comment on an author’s page counted as an entry into a draw with 10 $25 Amazon gift cards as a prize. Each comment counts as an entry, and winning multiple times is possible. We received over 300 comments within the last month. Thank you to everyone who contributed – you are really helping us out, and it’s great to see so much discussion going on. Plus, all of that helps add suggestions for “Reader’s Roulette”.
Here are the winners this month:
- Amy (amycinny)
- DianaB
- Jessa
- lindaluvsbooks
- Lisa (lisaddieh)
- Mac
- Pam
- stalsma (x2)
- SURDEN7
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment. That sort of content really helps out the site, and we enjoy reading all of your comments. We’re running a slightly different contest this month. The details are at the bottom of the newsletter.
It’s been an incredible year for Book Notification. So many authors added, so many new features, and we have so much more to come. 2025 is going to be a great year, and I want to personally thank every one of you for your support. So many new users to Book Notification cite “recommended by a friend/family member” as the reason for signing up, and it means so much to us that you are out there spreading the word.
Thank You.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
Site Improvements & Updates
Reader’s Roulette: The first phase of our “Book Discovery” section, where you can discover new books to read.
On the Reader’s Roulette page, there are three sections. A random series description, a random book review from a Book Notification user, and a random comment posted on an author’s page. Here is a screenshot:
If any of those pique your interest, you can “Click to Reveal”, and it will list what book series, author, or book is referenced with a link for you to read more about the book or see the author page. You can click to randomize each section again to see different reviews, comments or descriptions.
Head on over to the Reader’s Roulette section and give it a spin. It’s a lot of fun, and all reviews and comments are in there, positive or negative. And thanks to BN user Park, who e-mailed in with a suggestion which resulted in this.
Their suggestion was a page listing every comment ever posted on Book Notification to help them browse and discover new authors. With tens of thousands of comments, this just wasn’t practical, but we loved its concept, brainstormed, and turned it into Reader’s Roulette. As always – we appreciate any ideas and suggestions.
Book Release Calendar: Currently, all Book Notification users have a personalized calendar based on the authors they follow. We have now set up a book release calendar covering EVERY book or upcoming book listed on Book Notification. Here’s a screenshot of the desktop version:
And you can see it for yourself here. And don’t worry – your personalized calendar will, of course, remain.
We had users requesting a book release calendar for every author, something that the now defunct website FictFact offered back in the day, so we created this.
Design Changes: We have made major design changes to all of the “category” pages within Book Notification to make for a much better user experience. A few examples are the book news and book blog sections.
New Content Added
In addition to adding authors, we post a lot of book news and book-related content to Book Notification each month. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter:
Monthly Contest
Quality content and discussion are always beneficial for our website. This month, we invite you to write book reviews for books you have read. This will be helpful to us for Reader’s Roulette, plus the imminent launch of book pages.
The easiest way to do this, if you have the book marked ‘read’ on Book Notification, is head over to My Reviews. Any books you have marked read but haven’t written a review for will have an “Add Review” button. Click that, click the “My Review” tab, and then write your review and click “Save”.
Otherwise, you can click the checkbox to the left of the book on any author’s page and then access the “My Review” tab from there.
We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a review from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each review earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter multiple times so review as much as you want!
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated.
