[M T McGuire]

I like the idea but it won’t let me sign in unless I give it my password for google, facebook or twitter. I’m not too overjoyed with the prospect of sharing those and usually, where given the option - goodreads for example - I decline and use my email and password. This one gives me no option to decline so it’s already a pain in the arse because I have to contact them and ask why there isn’t a normal sign up option.

With regards to the search engine: It still has a lot of trouble differentiating between writers with the same name. I think I was the first McGuire to publish indie (2010) but more McGuires have started since then, two at least, way more successful than I am: Seanan and Jamie. This means my comedic science fiction fantasy books don’t appear under fantasy at all because Seanan’s do instead. They do appear under humour though, with some joke books. A partial success then.

The usual method I advise to get round the multiple McGuires problem is for my followers to enter the name of my series: K’Barthan. However, the search on Booksniffer has trouble with an apostrophe so if you do that you just get a lot of nekkid manchest/bikini clad female books in Spanish.

They’ve listed my first in series, which is cool but not the free short story ... or anything else, to be honest. Which is a bit less cool.

So I’ve emailed them ... I’ll be interested to see what they say.

Cheers

MTM
I am wide but the book they have listed from me is only listed on Amazon.

 

[M T McGuire]

Hi MT. Thanks for the comments! I'll tackle 'em one by one:

The reason we require you to authenticate via a third party platform is for security, both for you and for our readers. For one, we don't get your password when you authenticate via Google, Facebook, or Twitter - their internal authentication systems handle it; that way, we never see or store a password for you anywhere. More importantly though, authors have the ability to message their fans in our app. We have to have a way to make sure we can authenticate a person's identity in case they abuse the system - for example, say someone signs up and pretends to be Stephen King with a fake email address. Then they send a bunch of abusive stuff to Stephen King fans. Having a third party authentication in the chain (which will be way more sophisticated out of the box than anything we can yet build) helps discourage that sort of thing, and also gives us a way to find the abuser through those partners.

If you sign up on the platform, you get a "follow me" link that takes your fans directly to *your* books in the platform, so you don't have to worry about the name search issue when directing your fans to follow you. Our search is getting smarter, by the way - we have a machine learning system that is crunching data as people search more and more on the platform, and as it learns what people are really looking for, it will improve over time.

Specifically with regards to the apostrophe issue - that one is on the list. Not to get too far into the weeds on it, but that's kind of like a whack-a-mole problem; we handle apostrophes one way, it breaks how something else works. We have some logic built to handle it, but it runs slow, so we're trying to speed it up before we roll it out. I expect that fix to be out soon.

We JUST built a new function to find books on other retailers besides Amazon, which will go through our library of the millions of books we have in the system to add those other retailer links. Last I heard from our dev team, that's in QA and just about ready to roll out, as early as tomorrow.

I hope all this is helpful - I was going to reply to your email but I figured I'd just reply here, so everyone can benefit from the response

Thanks, I very much appreciate your taking the time to answer that lot. The why new sites want me to use my log in to another site thing was especially useful knowledge. On the up to date nature of the info others have raised, my iPad is telling me stuff was last updated in May so I imagine there's a fair bit to do before it's running smoothly. Also as a member of the other 250million English speakers in the world, looking forward to the day it becomes non US centric; UK, RSA and Oceania would be brilliant.

That said, your enthusiasm and all round passion for this project is obvious. I operate on a very small scale so I doubt I'll be troubling the million advertising dollars thing and it may turn out that I lack the time to do it properly and my books are as lost in the noise on Booksniffer as they are everywhere else, but I'll experiment with it and see how it goes!

Best of luck with it anyway.

Cheers

MTM

 

[M T McGuire]

I’ve just thought, I know not everyone uses them, but Smashwords would be a good addition to the list of author pages as well as Gplay which I think Patty Jansen suggested.

Cheers

MTM

 

[M T McGuire]

So I’m thinking that if you could manage a search algorithm that was as smart as say ... Spotify? Then I could see this being a game changer. It’s a big if though. Is this the kind of thing you’re aiming at? Not the Spotify corporate ethics, I mean, but a really smart algorithm that spots things people have enjoyed and offers them similar ...