Welcome to the May edition of the Book Notification Newsletter.
We now have over 46,000 authors audited and listed on the site. The database team continues to focus on imported reader lists from other websites or apps and adding any authors requested via the website. We love seeing so many people switching to Book Notification.
One big feature that needed to be added to Book Notification was statistics. We have just launched a reader statistics section, so that you can see stats on your book library. More information about that is in the “New Features” section.
The first anniversary of our official launch is next month. It’s great looking back at everything we have accomplished since we officially launched a year ago. But it’s even more exciting looking forward to all our plans for the site. The team is currently working on many features, big and small, that should see the light of day before the year is out. Just a few of the big projects we are currently working on:
- Book pages: display book reviews, data about the book, and more.
- An area of the site where you can do multiple ratings or reviews of books at once. If you have a lot of books not rated, you can easily rate them in bulk to get the full effect of the “My Stats” area. This will also assist with personalized book recommendations, which is another feature we are working on.
- Book and author genres, along with the ability to tag or confirm book genres.
- Series search.
Just a few of the great features planned for Book Notification!
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. We’re hoping to change it up very soon but are just waiting until book pages are launched. Note: Each comment counts as an entry, and winning multiple times is possible. We received over 250 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. Here are the winners this month:
- Arch
- Denis M
- Jessa
- mbitner
- Pam
- schiffwilliam
- stalsma
- su_flay
- Tami
- The Little Man
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
My Stats: We are all big stats nerds here at Book Notification, and we’re excited to launch the first phase of reader stats. You can check your stats right now by clicking here, and you can find this section in the “My Library” area. Here is an example screenshot:
We have this work broken into phases.
Phase 1: The launch today, with base stats such as general readership, yearly, and rating data.
Phase 2: Every other statistic we can think of. That’s where you come in – if there are any stats you would like to see, please contact us and let us know and we’ll add it to the list.
Phase 3: Implementing the ability to view the data in charts, graphs, etc.
As additional features are added to the site, we will incorporate them into the stats as well. For example, we plan on implementing book and author genre data soon, and our data team has been working on that. Once that data is on the site, it will be incorporated into the stats as well, where you would be able to get a breakdown of all statistics by genre, etc.
Head over to the My Stats section, check it out and let us know what additional statistics you’d like to see.
Random Button: Just an example of the minor features we will add based on user request. Last month, we added the “Random” button to the Want To Read area so you can pick a random book off your TBR to read. Per user request, we have now added this under My Books, and also What’s Next.
Subreddit: Last month, I mentioned that if you wanted to get social notifications about new books released, blog content that we post, and any book news, you could follow our Facebook and Twitter. We also have a subreddit where all news posts are published, so if you’re a Reddit user, feel free to follow us there.
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
Having quality content and discussion is always beneficial for our website. This month, we are again asking you to write a comment on an authors page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, or what their best book or series is. You could write 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
You can find the comment form at the bottom of every authors page, titled “Author Discussion”.
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s truly appreciated.