Welcome to the June edition of the Book Notification Newsletter.
We celebrated our first official anniversary this past week. After launching our beta phase on January 1st, 2023, we left beta on June 26th, 2023. However, the site has been online longer – we alpha launched on June 26th, 2022, so technically, it was two years since Book Notification was online.
This month’s significant feature is the ability to “Quick Follow” multiple authors at once. There is more on that in the “New Features” section.
Our development team is also hard at work on other big features, such as book pages, series search, spreadsheet importing, genres, and more. We have many great ideas and plans and can’t wait to implement them all.
It’s been an incredible year, though, since that beta launch. Here are some of the incredible highlights from our team’s efforts over the past year:
- From 24,000 authors book lists to 49,000
- The “What’s Next” Feature
- Book tagging
- Book search
- Author insights
- Reader stats
- Booktalks: check out our latest with J.D. Barker
And so many more, with a lot of great stuff in the works. A lot of the work this month was behind the scenes, focusing on efficiency and making minor improvements to increase the user experience. For example, when you mark a book read, it auto-follows the author (unless you have that toggled in settings). However, it didn’t actually indicate that until you refreshed the page. So, we updated that to reflect it immediately.
And good news – we’re finally going to mix up the contest!
Last month, we ran a contest where every comment you make on an author’s page will earn you entry into a draw with 10 $25 Amazon gift cards as a prize, and we will run that contest again this month. Thank you to everyone who contributed – you are really helping us out, and it’s great to see so much discussion going on. Here are the winners this month:
- Debra14
- DianaB
- Doug T.
- Jungleed
- Keith R.
- Lisa C.
- lisajbear
- mbitner
- Roaring Fish
- stalsma
You should have all received an e-mail confirming your e-mail address for the gift card.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
New Features
Quick Follow: Until now, if you wanted to follow an author, you would have to visit their page and click the blue follow button. It works well, but it isn’t the ideal solution for new users who want to mass-follow many authors at once.
Introducing the “Quick Follow” feature found on the Followed Authors page. Here it is in action:
In short, start typing an author’s name in that box. You can then click to “Follow” them to get notified of new books by them, then type in the next author’s name. There is no need to visit multiple authors’ pages anymore. It also displays “Unfollow” to indicate you are already following that author.
Still To Read: While not a “big” feature, this was something requested by a lot of users who are completionists whose goal is to read every book written by an author.
Now, under your Followed Authors is a new column titled “Still To Read”. This will show how many books you still need to read by an author.
Note that if you mark it as “DNF” or “Not Interested”, that will also remove it from this count. This tracks books with no book status or flagged “Want To Read”. Here’s an example:
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:
Contest
This month, we’re starting the reader mailbag, and our contest is associated with that. We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who reply to this email and submit feedback for the reader mailbag.
Let’s kickstart it with one of the more straightforward questions.
You’re stranded on a desert island and can have one book series with you. You will have to re-read this book series until the end of time. What series would that be?
To submit your answer, hit reply or use any of the contact forms on our site. Winners will be announced in the July newsletter.
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s truly appreciated.