Some of you may have noticed a brief interruption of the site this morning. This interruption was intentional this time! I am happy to report the following new additions and changes to the Sharing Books site:

1. The site now has the ability to list ISBN numbers on books. Over the next 48 hours expect to see ISBNs appearing on your book details pages. This is a manual process, so it will take some time to get all the books with ISBNs. Also note it can take up to 14 days for us to process a new book and get an ISBN for it, so if you have just uploaded work please be patient.
2. The 'Published Books' page on user profiles has been cleaned up, and should now give a better idea of the status of your book ( Approved, waiting approval, etc ).
3. The downloaded books count had a bug that was causing it to return false information on books that have been updated or changed. The bug caused the download count to only show the downloads for the most recent version of the book. We have corrected this, and the download count on the book details page now shows the full download history of a book, including all revisions. Anyone with a book that they have updated or made changes on should now see a download count number that is higher. In some cases significantly higher.
4. There have been a few minor adjustments to some back-end reporting tools for us site administrators, letting us do things like add ISBNs and resend Terms of Contribution emails on books which seem to be pending acceptance of the ToC. This should help streamline publishing, and ease the lag time on books with multiple creators involved.

Labels: features, news

We know how important donations are to our book creators. This money is what lets them produce the books that we are distributing for free, so any time we can find a way to help our authors and illustrators get donations we will attempt to help them out. Their success is our success.

So to help maximize donations we are going to be adding, over time, a number of things to the books on our site. The first is going to be a back page to each book that explains how Sharing Books works, with links that take the users to the donation page for an individual book. That means that no matter how many times a book is emailed around, there is always a way for people to click a link and donate to our book creators.

This is the first of many new things coming to help our authors and illustrators find not only success in driving their brand and popularity, but also tap into alternative forms of revenue available to them.

Labels: features, marketing, money

Some of you may have noticed a brief interruption of your Sharing Books experience this morning. We have pushed out some minor cosmetic changes, and most importantly we have launched our Partner Stores affiliate program. These are businesses and affiliates who have agreed to share a portion of the purchases that come from the Sharing Books website with our company. This money, like all our revenue sources, will be divided amongst our creators ( 1/3 ), Room to Read ( 1/3 ), and operations of the website ( 1/3 ).

If you have a moment take a look at our current affiliates.

Labels: features, news

Some of our users may have noticed two brief times where the site was down for maintenance today. Hopefully it did not freak anyone out too much! While the site was shut down for maintenance we did some upgrades to our database, our administrative back end, and added one new feature to the website.

On the book details page for each book you can now see how many times your book has been downloaded, giving you an idea of how popular your book is, and giving you some numbers and goals to shoot for! For those looking to get ahead of the pack in the current contests, you can poke about and get an idea of who is leading the pack. This number shows the total downloads over the lifetime of the book.

I'll gloss over the database stuff, since it is really just changes to let the download totals work on the site. The back end features let us track downloads over a period of time, so we can get an idea of book popularity over a given time frame, not just the lifetime of the book.

Labels: features, news, site upgrades