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March 11, 2024

#167 - It was definitely March...

...not February when the work on Plus was complete! But it's done, and there's a load of new features in the free plan to go with the change! 😎

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#167 | 11 March 2024

It was definitely March...


...everywhere. March 4th to be exact.

It definitely wasn't February anywhere. 😅

Custom Stats just ended up being more complicated than I envisaged. I'd been talking about it for so long that I wanted to go the extra mile with certain UX considerations, especially ones that I knew would be missed — and therefore remarked upon — from the get-go.

One aspect was the ability to customise the order in which your charts show up:
 
Screenshot of the "Manage Custom Charts" page. There is a list of panes, vertically stacked, each with a chart title and up and down arrows on them. The screenshot shows me mid dragging a pane down to a new location.
You can even drag and drop!

Another thing I knew several people would do: create charts that reflected their desired, more granular, page splits, instead of relying on our three buckets of fewer than 300 pages, 300-499 pages, and 500+ pages.

Now, was I really going tell our users "yeah, create a new tag for each page split and then manually tag every single book you've read to actually categorise the book" when we have all of that information on the books already?

No, no, I was not.
 
Screenshot of the "New Custom Chart" page. The bottom field is "Data type" and there are three radio button options, labelled "Tag", "Page length", and "Duration" respectively. Underneath the "Page length" option, italic text reads: "Set up page length segments and have StoryGraph automatically sort the books for you."

So yeah, the transition of Plus to its stats focus was a few days late, but who's counting...?


(Me. It's me. I am counting.)


(But I do know it doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things!)
 

Since last time...
 

So yes, Custom Stats is now live for Plus users, as well as the Compare Stats upgrade, complete with a new exclusive chart:
 
Double bar chart comparing genres between 2023 and 2022. 2023: Short Stories - 20 books, Literary - 14 books, Contemporary - 13 books, Historical - 10 books, Fantasy - 10 books, History - 8 books, Thriller - 8 books, Business - 7 books, Science Fiction - 7 books, Horror - 6 books. 2022: Business - 3 books, Contemporary - 15 books, Fantasy - 6 books, Historical - 11 books, History - 8 books, Horror - 4 books, Literary - 19 books, Science Fiction - 3 books, Short Stories - 4 books, Thriller - 12 books.
I did a Short Story challenge last year, which finally got me into the genre!

We've also transitioned a bunch of features to now be available to everyone for free: Up Next Suggestions, Personalized Similar Books, Advanced Similar Users, and our Personalized Preview Beta (and if you don't have a StoryGraph account you can now view the StoryGraph Preview Beta on any book page!). 
 

Next two weeks


None of the stuff I've mentioned in this issue has been officially announced yet!

I have one more configuration option to add to custom stats, one more feature to expose to everybody - Buddy Read Book Suggestions - and some copy to update in various places, and then we'll be good to go on announcements and in-app notifications.

And then, well...I guess some of you regular readers will be able to guess what my priority for the next couple of weeks will become...

Yes, it's book clubs! 😅
 

What I'm reading


I hope to start Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu so I can read alongside The Stacks Book Club for the first time and be ready for Traci's podcast interview on the 27th!

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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