#115 - Sixty Percent

#115

                March 14, 2022

            #115 - Sixty Percent

                What happened with Early Bird renewals, social media polls, and working on how editions are displayed around the app.

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#115 | 14 March 2022

Sixty percent

That's the proportion of people — sixty-two percent to be exact — who officially subscribed to Plus out of the 1400 that pre-ordered access to the extra features at the end of 2020.

I was hoping for 70-80% and so felt a little disappointed when I realised we wouldn't reach that number...

                    Screenshot of the top of fuzz's profile page. His profile picture is on the top left; he is facing the camera and wearing a red shirt. To the right of his profile picture is his username, fuzz, and an orange "Early Bird" badge.

Fuzz is one of our earliest users and I was delighted when he took out a subscription! 

However, I started to put it all in perspective: our Early Birds paid for something that didn't exist, at a discounted price, a year and a half ago, mainly because they were excited to support an indie alternative to Goodreads.

18 months later and most of them have stuck around, use the product multiple times a day, and have taken out a recurring annual subscription?

That's awesome!! 🥳

Since last time...

A recent change we've made that might seem small, but has had a big impact on the user experience while searching for books, is defaulting to the user's edition, if they have one marked.

So instead of seeing something like this when looking at the Popular This Week list:

                    Book pane for an edition of Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. Above the title reads "You've read another edition of this book". Other than that, the book doesn't look as if it has been touched by the user viewing the page.

You'll now see something like this:

                    Screenshot of part of The StoryGraph's Popular This Week page. Two books are shown. The bottom book is a different edition of A Little Life to the one shown in the picture boave. The main difference is cover image. Instead of the text above the title, the user's star rating of 4.5 stars is shown and the book is marked as 'read'.

Before making the changes in other places, such as when viewing authors, reading challenge prompts, or other users' profiles, we wanted to check in with our social media communities:

                    Screenshot of one of our recent Instagram stories. Against a light orange background, there is some text that reads: "There are three main options: (1) always default to your edition, (2) stick to the specific edition but show your read status/review on the book pane (the cover and/or title may be different), (3) keep it as it is: “You’ve read/want to read another edition of this book. When viewing another person's profile page, which would you prefer?". Then there's an image of a part of a user's currently reading page. Underneath is a poll, where the results can be seen as follows: 1. Show me my edition - 41%, 2. Show my read status/review - 28%, 3. Keep it as it is - 31%.

As we suspected, this was the most divisive poll. We're surprised that "Show me my edition" was the most voted-for option in this particular case! Don't worry — we can see it's not what the majority of people want though...

Next two weeks

We'll be implementing further changes to viewing editions based on the feedback we received and tackling a couple of reading challenge-related items on the roadmap.

If you follow us on Instagram and don't have a Plus account but would like one, stay tuned to our posts this week. We'll be running a giveaway for a one-year subscription, which was generously donated by one of our Early Birds! 😊

What I'm reading

I'll be starting Losing the Signal this week for a buddy read with a friend!

                    Book pane for Losing The Signal by Jacquie McNish, and Sean Silcoff. To the left is the book cover. It's black with white text and a white image of a Blackberry. To the right is the book information. The book is tagged as nonfiction, business, history, technology, informative, and fast-paced. It has 288 pages and was first published in 2015. There's a custom tag on the bottom reading 'march-tbr'. 

Have a great week,

Nadia

P.S. Know somebody who's an avid reader or would enjoy following along with this journey? Please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

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