Welcome to the November edition of the Book Notification newsletter! I hope everyone had a great reading month, and all our American readers had a great Thanksgiving.
There’s no question what the best book I read this month was: 11/22/63 by Stephen King. And I was even satisfied with the ending – which is rare with Stephen King books for me! A 10/10 recommendation from me.
We’d love to create year-end summaries of your reading for sharing on social media and allow you to vote on your favorite books from the past year.
While we haven’t been able to focus on those yet, they’re on our radar for next year. We’ve spent a lot of the year adding features which are integral to a better user experience, plus a lot of efficiency work behind the scenes. With such a big growth of the site, both in terms of users and quantity of authors, we’ve had to revamp and rework entire sections of the backend to keep up with it all which is why we haven’t added them yet.
Those are features we are eager to add though, and are looking forward to them next year when we’re able to focus more on them, and make them the best they possibly can be. If there’s anything you would like in those wrap-ups be sure to let me know, so we can make sure to include it.
If you are looking for any Christmas gift ideas for the book lover in your life, or just want to add some items of your own to Santa’s wishlist, we’ve compiled a list of 10 Great Christmas Gift Ideas for Book Lovers, from my personal favourite, the Author Click, to hair clips and blankets.
And I also wanted to highlight our latest Booktalks: with Bukovero. Bukovero is a book cover designer, and it was my favourite interview to date. I was fascinated by it all, and could have asked a thousand more questions.
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, and we will run that contest again this month. Note: 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. Here are the winners this month:
- Annmarie
- Arch
- Ciao45
- Cory J.
- DianaB
- Goodal
- Jan (sew.fun)
- lindaluvsbooks
- stalsma (x2)
Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment. That sort of content really helps out the site, and we really enjoy reading all of your comments. We’re running the same contest this month—read on for more about that.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
Follow Us: Facebook | Twitter (X) | bSky | Instagram | reddit
Site Improvements & Updates
Data Export: We have now added the ability for you to export all of your data on Book Notification. You can export a list of all your followed authors, or export a list of all books plus their data, status, notes, tags etc. You can find this at the bottom of your settings page.
Series #: One of many minor updates but one we wanted to highlight as it was requested by many people; now in My Books the series # is displayed for each book.
Efficiency Improvements: As mentioned in the opening, a lot of our focus right now is on streamlining processes The site just gets bigger and bigger, so we’re hard at work improving the backend, and implementing structures and automated processes to make all of the work more efficient.
For example, we write up daily new releases posts with a list of the book releases that day, feature a handful of books, and then promote that post across all our social media channels. Since we started that in May, it has been a very time consuming job and can take up to an hour each day. We have created a new system for it, and the process now takes no more than 15 minutes.
Just one example of the efficiency improvements being done behind-the-scenes by our incredible developmental team.
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.
