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Show HN: ShelfJoy (making buzzfeed for books)

shelfjoy.com

3 pointswowsig6 comments

This is quite interesting! (Former book editor here.) I will totally use this to discover and buy books.

I might suggest your "buzzfeed for books" comparison doesn't do it justice. Perhaps "Pinterest for books" or "Reddit for books"?

As feedback, a few thoughts off the cuff: - I'm hesitant to auth Twitter, because you ask for permission to post but don't do the thing where you promise never to post on my behalf without advance warning. - I think the "shelves" model is interesting. I'm definitely interested in what David Bowie found interesting. Maybe not so much Art Garfunkel (though IIRC he is an obsessive reader so who knows) - It would be interesting if there was some cut where, for a given book on a given shelf, you could see other popular/relevant shelves it was on. Sort of the way Twitter surfaces tweets in your timeline that were liked by a friend. - Maybe a view of just books, not shelves. - I want to see what others had to say about these books, not just whose shelves they're on. Maybe that comes later, when you have more activity? - Looks like you can add a book to your reading list, "heart" it, or "heart" a whole shelf. This is a slightly confusing information architecture, vs. something like on Airbnb which has a clear architecture of saving properties you like to a list. Might want to refine that a bit.

Hey Greg,

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Reddit for books would definitely be more relatable to people on HN :)

You've suggested some serious interesting things.

Like giving the link to other shelves on which a book is. I currently don't have a book view because the site itself is very new and I want to validate if people really like the proposition as such. But this information can be integrated in the current shelf model too. I'm thinking something at the bottom of a shelf where the reader gets to see the other shelves that contain the same books.

Hearting of a shelf and the share on the right is indeed confusing people. Will do something about it sooner than later.

Thank you again for taking out the time to write your feedback :)

My pleasure and definitely agree some of the things I suggested go well beyond MVP. It is the blessing and the curse of getting product feedback that the second you do something interesting, people want a million more features ;-).

Good luck with it!

Looks pretty interesting. I like the curation a lot better than some others I've seen. Although this may be a function of user base and audience at present. My comparison would be Goodreads, which is so overwhelmed with historical romance, fluff, young-adult sci-fi, and New-Agey self-help that I've yet to see anything on their newsletters that looks remotely appealing to me. People love that stuff, but it's not what I'm looking for.

I'd be curious (at some later date) to know what kind of a return you're getting on Amazon affiliate fees. At this point, that's the most reliable advertising income stream on my side-projects. It seems to be the best deal going, considering it's a pretty minimally invasive kind of advertising, and they actually pay a decent cut on referred sales. And that's on a piddly little blog that has some reviews, some code tutorials, and a page where I list some favorite books, as opposed to something like this which is really designed to get people to convert.

Thanks for the warm words :)

Affiliate is just working enough for me to pay the server bills (less than 100 USD). So here's the thing I'm noticing about Affiliate commissions - currently, the only way to get decent commissions is to have a lot of shelves that are popular. Its just 3 months of launch and due to lack of aggressive marketing of any kind, most of the shelves are just sitting there.

The ones that get popular are converting well. I still need to figure out if this can be made mainstream by chance.

Hello HN,

I've been working on ShelfJoy for quite sometime now. I've thought of ShelfJoy to be like buzzfeed for books where people can discover curated books on deep niche topics.

Curation is guided by algorithms in a few cases but finalised by an editor.

Wanted to know your feedback on this. If you think it works for you or not and what can I do to improve it.

Thanks in advance.

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