http://anynewbooks.com is made by me and it's already bringing in some revenue. Not serious money yet (hundreds not thousands of dollars), mind you, but it has been profitable from day one and growing relatively fast.
1. The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow. (I realize the difficulty with email)
2. On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?
3. Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc)
Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.
> The first thing I go looking for is a synopsis. Amazon isn't always good at this, you should try to incorporate this somehow.
Unfortunately, I tried this one week and it didn't work. The emails ended up being very long, the click through fell down, and I received a few emails of complaints from people who liked the more compact email without descriptions, because they didn't feel obligated to read the whole thing.
It's possible that I may make this an option in the future, but at the moment I'm dealing with other items on the todo list.
> On your "staff pick" could you do a bit of a review?
This is a very valid suggestion and it will probably be implemented soon enough. I think even a one liner saying why it's our pick would help.
> Canada. Give me some Canada options eh! (I know, I know, bigger market etc etc)
I added this feature this week: http://blog.anynewbooks.com/2010/10/new-feature-for-internat... BTW, I'm in Canada myself. :)
> Keep up the nice work... I will buy books from this.
Thank you.
One strange thing I noticed is that when I search for something, say javascript, there are lots of results but the page automatically jumps all the way down to the sign up form. Why don't you let me see the results first? If you want me to sign up, you could have a link next to each result saying something like "Don't miss out on more good books like this. Sign up now for weekly updates." If your suggestions are any good, I would love to sign up anyway. Please don't force me to.
Basically, the Sign up page contains the word "javascript", so if you search for it, that page will be included by the search function. Given that the email textbox grabs the focus, you'll get immediately sent to the bottom of the page.
If you try to search for something else you will not experience this behavior: http://img.skitch.com/20101007-xpcmkm4ebj4kiwsbsfiknsc7m4.jp...
Thank you again for reporting this. I'll fix this ASAP.
But I'm still not clear how the sign up page is included. Aren't you searching a database based on keywords and generating pages on the fly? What do you mean by "that page will be included by the search function"? I don't see any dedicated pages for individual books.
In the future I plan to make the search a much more prominent feature, sort of like a search engine for new books. At that time, I will use a backend which will contain the individual books, rather than simply do a text search through the newsletter archives.