Something is missing?

[William King]

I want to start this suggestion by saying first of all that the new look to the website is very good. The front page is attractive, has ten books being published with covers and summaries, making it easy for someone coming to the site to pick up a book to read.

However, the front page is missing one big thing and that is a similar link to completed books, those in the library previously published. Now obviously you cannot scroll through the hundreds of books in the library. My suggestion is that you take a few, let's say six books by six different authors and put those on the front page in a second row of books. You would then have books being published and a book selection.

The selection of the month would be random, but with six books, every author gets one book on the front page each year. Now comes the second part of this suggestion: the featured books should be reviewed. This takes a few members with the time to read a book and review it (it is not easy to write a book review). If you adopt the suggestion I volunteer as a reviewer (I already have reviews posted in the forum so you can see an example).

This I believe is an important missing element to the site. Imagine you are coming here for the first time, you do not necessarily want to read books in the process of being published. You go to the library, and wow, 63 authors, hundreds of books, nothing categorised (it's more like a garage sale than a library). You will end up picking at random, reading a short summary, then the first chapter. 

Ideally, all those books should be categorised (Sci-fi, romance, drama, adventure, etc.), you can't truly call it a library without categorising the books. A mammoth task.

The featuring of six completed books on the front page, with summaries and reviews, will over time categorise the books and in the meantime give readers a way to select a book they might like to read. It would be like picking a book off the shelf and reading the sleeve. Each featured book would have, genre, summary, review.

 

[Al Norris]

One of the goals, in defining the new site was to classify (categorize) each story (book) by its genré. We achieved that. When you click on "Library", one of the selections you may make is to view the "Stories by Genré". That part is done.

One of the other goals, besides making the home page more visually appealing, was to keep it simple and uncluttered. I'm not sure that adding another scroll bar would be in keeping with that goal. This is not to say that your suggestion is being dismissed out of hand, just that we would need to discuss this.

Ideally, such a discussion would be open to everyone (readers and admins) to get a consensus.

[ken barber]

10 hours ago, Al Norris said:

One of the goals, in defining the new site was to classify (categorize) each story (book) by its genré. We achieved that. When you click on "Library", one of the selections you may make is to view the "Stories by Genré". That part is done.

One of the other goals, besides making the home page more visually appealing, was to keep it simple and uncluttered. I'm not sure that adding another scroll bar would be in keeping with that goal. This is not to say that your suggestion is being dismissed out of hand, just that we would need to discuss this.

Ideally, such a discussion would be open to everyone (readers and admins) to get a consensus.

I am not opposed to this I think it might be a good idea I am concerned with the sustainability of getting reviews done for the selected pieces. In the past trying to get members to be active continuously has been an exercise in futility and more often than not its the same members doing all the work over and over again. So I am open to the discussion and to see if we can get some interest. 

[William King]

5 hours ago, ken barber said:

So I am open to the discussion and to see if we can get some interest. 

I volunteer to to review at least one book per month, that's a commitment.

 

15 hours ago, Al Norris said:

When you click on "Library", one of the selections you may make is to view the "Stories by Genré

The books by genre I just didn't see, which is pretty stupid when it's right there in your face.

 

5 hours ago, ken barber said:

One of the other goals, besides making the home page more visually appealing, was to keep it simple and uncluttered.

I still think there is room for another row of completed books on the front page and this would attract readers, but the alternative is to have that row of completed books in the library, but then you need to go looking.

The thing is a lot of people coming to this site and similar sites are looking to read finished stories, not books in progress, and not wanting to labour the point, that is not too well catered for. I do think that the pattern is - find the site, find a completed book, read it, like it, then maybe a book in progress, then want to comment, finally become a member. You could check if this assumption is right by comparing page views for members, non-members, in progress books, completed books. Just to get an idea check page views for the last published chapter of books in progress against completed books for say the second chapter, which kind of indicates the readership mix, in progress v complete.

Another tiny comment, bearing in mind you have all done a lot of hard work on getting the new site up and running, the front page Philosophy text font is big and takes up half the screen.

 

[ken barber]

We created kind of a comprise to your suggestions.  While we have the readers choice featured for a month each Monday we will feature an editors pick for the week. These will be completed books that the admins, editors, and authors have chosen as some of there favorites. The only requirement is that there are competed works. This will give us four completed works a month featured. If anyone would like to make a suggestion for a feature please send me a private message and I will add it to the list.  Still not throwing out the idea of reviews yet but haven't come up with a workable solution for it yet.