It has been a very busy weekend on the technical front. Building on all the database work in November, we’ve now updated the Search so you can now search on ASIN, Author, or Exact Phrase.
We’ve also updated the Reviews email to improve the way it handles third party reviews. They are now a lot more visible and display the title, author and genre of the book they refer to, so authors who want to promote a blog review or bloggers who want more visibility should get more readers from them.
We’re making a few more changes to the book page to help improve navigation, so finding things like Newspaper or Video reviews will be easier as there will be a link at the top. We’re now working on integrating a reviews feed from a few third parties, whose names you will know.
And the big change is the Sample page, which now does not use Kindle for Web, but a sample of the book supplied directly by Amazon. This isn’t just a better layout and easier to read either; we’re now working on a way to check if the sample is available and only link one from the book’s page if it is.
The sidebar covers have been a great success for us. They’re providing much more relevant content, and slots have been taken through to the end of January. The three days at the end of November provided users with over 10,000 views, so we can only hope that December will be very high. We’re working on ways to add click counters to them, so authors can see how many direct clicks they get.
Since we’ve had a few queries about why sponsorships are important and why we can’t just take ads off? Every sponsorship or sidebar cover really does make a difference, as we’re on a really tight budget (e.g. a Kindle Unlimited Subscription so the club can review books before they go free is a nice idea but not currently affordable). Without our miracle technical crew, paid in homemade cake, we couldn’t have done any of it. Huge thanks to the RA Team for giving up their weekend to get this done.
And finally the column has gone off to the Citizen, the authors have been notified and now we’re waiting and hoping it all turns out OK.
