Book Notification Newsletter: January 2025

By: Graeme, January 26th, 2025 4:01 pm.

Ask A LibrarianWelcome everyone to the January Book Notification newsletter.

A quick shout-out to the author David J. Gatward, who writes the excellent DCI Harry Grimm series. We received an influx of new users on Friday, citing David’s newsletter. He took the time to promote Book Notification, which we greatly appreciate. Thanks, David. And check out the DCI Harry Grimm series – after you’re finished reading this newsletter, of course!

We launched the Book Notification podcast this month. That’s something I am very excited about. We like to take the K.I.S.S. concept to any new projects. Start small, and let it naturally evolve. To start with, we are doing a weekly podcast released every weekend that covers 10 of the best new books coming out in the upcoming week.

Where will that podcast be a year from now? I’m not sure, but I am excited to see how it grows and evolves.

The latest podcast is live now, and you can listen and subscribe via all of your favourite podcast services.

We now have over 65,000 authors audited and listed on Book Notification. I don’t mention it enough, but this is what I am the most proud of. The work that goes into auditing our lists is incredible—we pull in every book, verify that it was actually released, look for alternate titles and chronological timeline differences, organize them within each series, etc.

For example, we recently audited the author Charles M. Schulz, who wrote the Peanuts comics. This author alone took over 12 hours to organize. But it’s worth it, as now we have a complete and accurate list. Compare that to other book websites which have incomplete and misleading listings, including unrelated items such as birthday cards and toys!

Authors also do things differently, and not a day goes by without a puzzle to solve. One example that stands out from the past month is an author who released one book that was over 1000 pages long. Then, they decided to break that book up into two, giving each part a new title.

They divided those titles into separate series. However, a year later, they decided to retitle the books AGAIN and separate them into two separate series. They also rewrote a book within one of the series to make a prequel.

THEN, the author decided to merge the series instead, rewrite the book that was not a prequel and then became a prequel NOT to be a prequel, and, of course, change the titles AGAIN.

Did you follow all that? Probably not. But that’s just one of the many headaches our amazing database staff deal with every day! Don’t worry – we love figuring these brainteasers out and getting it completely accurate for you.

To make it worse, all of those titles are still floating out there, available to purchase on Amazon, which can make it confusing for readers. We had to figure all of that out and then write a clear explanation on the page regarding the listing to assist people. All of those changes by the author took place over an 18-month period, too.

That ties into our primary focus this month, which, while not exciting for you guys, was huge for us. Over the past month, we completely overhauled our backend. The backend, originally built in 2018, had grown complex with years of updates and new features. So a complete rebuild was the more practical choice.

This means we are a bit light on new user features this month, but it’s worth it for how much easier it will make our work going forward. These updates mean quicker author audits and a smoother experience for all staff.

Our biggest focus since our January 2023 launch has been auditing and adding authors, and we’re finally getting to the point where that phase of the site will be mostly complete, and our data team can prioritize other areas.

Last month, we held a contest where each review you wrote for a book earned one entry, with 10 $25 USD gift cards as a prize. Thank you to everyone who did this – it’s helping fill out the Reader’s Roulette section nicely. We’ll alternate between that and comments for the next few months.

Here are the winners this month:

  1. Beth C.
  2. Brenda E.
  3. Bud
  4. Donald E. B
  5. Elizabeth H.
  6. Gary (gmrik)
  7. Joyce D
  8. Mac
  9. Pam
  10. sefccw

Thanks to everyone who took the time to write a review. That sort of content helps out Reader’s Roulette, and I’ve already added a few books to my own TBR thanks to your reviews.

Until the next chapter,

Graeme
Book Notification Founder

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Site Improvements & Updates


Spoiler Tags: We have added spoiler tags to the site. These can be used in comments and book reviews and, when applicable, in other areas of the site.

They are straightforward to use. You put the spoiler text inside a shortcode like so:

[spoiler]I can’t believe Keyser Söze was Macaulay Culkin.[/spoiler]

And that text will be flagged as a spoiler like the below and the reader will have to click an option to see the hidden text.

Quick Follow: It’s not a new feature, but last year we implemented the “Quick Follow” option to allow new users to follow a wide variety of authors without having to visit their pages. That feature was available on the followed authors page; however, we found that quite a few users were unaware of it.

So we have added it to the sidebar of the site, which is found on almost all pages on Book Notification, as shown here:

This is the best method if you’re looking to follow many authors at once. You start typing the name of an author, click the +Follow button and then type in the name of another author to follow them, without having to visit their pages.

Podcast: As mentioned earlier in the newsletter, we launched the weekly Book Notification Podcast.


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 are asking you to write a comment on an author’s page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, what their best book or series is, or about an adaptation of their book. Any and all comments are welcome.

We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a comment from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each comment earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter multiple times so comment as much as you want!

The comment form is at the bottom of every author’s page, titled “Author Discussion”.

Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated.

Space

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