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June 21, 2021

#96 - Slow-paced, please!

Some people love a slow-paced book, an online controversy, and planning for upcoming new features!

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#96 | 21 June 2021

In the mood for something slow

 
The point of The StoryGraph is to help people choose their next perfect book.

While some people love a fast-paced read, where there's a lot of action or story developments in a short space of time, others can't stand it.

And sometimes, no matter your usual preferences, your mood means that you're being drawn to something slower, something where more time is spent learning about the characters or the setting of the book.
 
A screenshot showing part of a filter menu on The StoryGraph. Under the "Pace" section, the "Slow" textbox is checked.
Often our users are actively looking for slow-paced reads only!

Now, while there are readers' preferences, there are also author and publisher perspectives.

In the latter cases, "slow" appears to equate to something negative, namely "boring", and now and again we get angry messages from authors asking why we would dare do such a thing as tag their work as 'slow-paced', demanding that we immediately change it. 😩

I wonder if this is something we'll always have to deal with as we grow, or if there will be a way to adapt this perception and show that the only thing we intend to do here is match books with their ideal readers, leading to a win-win for everyone involved!
 

Since last time...
 

This last week has been anything but slow-paced!

For one, we had our first experience of serious online controversy. 😰

Our content warnings feature came under fire after a series of well-known authors brought to light that inaccurate warnings were being attached to their books:
 
A tweet from Adiba Jaigirdar. The tweet expresses horror at the content warnings listed against her book on The StoryGraph and says that highlighted in red are all the warnings that do not appear in the book. Six warnings are highlighted, including "Racial slurs", "Child abuse" ,"Transphobia", and more.
This tweet has over 2000 likes and almost 600 retweets!
 
I woke up to a text from Rob, who'd been handling the Twitter situation for hours while I had been asleep.

We both stayed calm, discussed what was happening and what our options were, and then sprung into action.

We first sent out a series of apologies, came up with a product update to improve the situation, sought feedback on it from the community, and then I coded all day and night to implement the changes.
 
A screenshot of the content warnings page for The Henna Wars. At the top is a section headed "Author-approved" content warnings, with a few listed under each of the headings: Graphic, Moderate and Minor. Then there is a second section labelled "User-submitted". The same three sections exist and under each are a series of tags, with the name of the warning in them, and the number of reviewers who've added that tags in parentheses afterwards.
Now authors or publishers can submit their own content warnings and these take precedence on a book's page. You can also click through to see the review attached to each user-submitted warning.

It was a wild and stressful time, but we pulled through!

Throughout, I kept on thinking about my last newsletter. We could tell that people thought there was a larger team behind it all!
 
A tweet from author Aiden Thomas reading: thank you so much — i love what The StoryGraph stands for and it’s disappointing that a well-meaning feature has been misused like this. i definitely don’t blame the dev team for any of this and i really appreciate your team’s dedication to finding a solution
I wish there was a dev team! Maybe if we sold a lot more Plus subscriptions. 😅
 

Next two weeks


Those were just the first steps in a series of changes that we needed to make to that area of the product.

Behind the scenes, we've been slowly working on a review policy. Now it's time to revisit it and also look towards how people can flag reviews from within the app for violations of our future policy.

Separate to that, soon we'll be working on new features again — including the next version of the stats dashboard, the "Up Next" section on the To-Read Pile, and finding and inviting your friends — so we need to start thinking about the design and technical implementation of those!
 

What I'm reading right now


For #ReadCaribbean month, I've started listening to Sweethand by N.G. Peltier. Thanks go to Libro.fm for my free copy!
A screenshot of the book pane of Sweethand. The genre tags are 'fiction', 'contemporary', and 'lgbtqia+' and the mood tags are 'emotional' and 'lighthearted'. It's also tagged 'medium-paced' and has 320 pages.

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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