#96 - Slow-paced, please!

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.
 

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!
 

 

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.
 

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!
 

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!
 

For #ReadCaribbean month, I've started listening to Sweethand by N.G. Peltier. Thanks go to Libro.fm for my free copy!

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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