I love how you’re continuously working on this stuff, and everything is getting so much better!

The Discover page seems fine for people who are new and just want to browse a wide range of things. I far prefer to use the search function to narrow down what I’m looking for - I can look by Status + Genre, which is fantastic. In thinking of what I would want to suggest, I decided to be smart and check to see if it already exists, and...

GUYS. Maybe everyone knew this and I didn’t, but YOU CAN SEARCH BY ANY WORD IN THE SYNOPSIS!! Which means you can tag your stuff - feminist, LGBTQ+, humor, etc etc etc, AND PEOPLE CAN SEARCH BY THAT STUFF!!! I’m so excited!

And it works to search by a term and then narrow it down by status and genre, so I could search for, say, "humor" and then narrow it down to Currently Funding + Science Fiction, and see the humorous scifi books that I can pre-order!!!

Of course, it’s not very functional if nobody knows you can search that way. Readers need to know they can search by general terms AND authors need to tag their books in order for it to be useful, but the functionality is there!!!

I recommend, then, some sort of note or guide for when authors create their projects so they know they can include a tags section to make their projects easier to find; and also a note underneath the search function letting people know they can search by general categories besides just the status and genre ones (ex: young adult, humor, werewolves). (Yes, I know YA is a genre, but search for that term and you’ll see lots of YA categorized as fiction, scifi, fantasy, etc that doesn’t come up when you choose just the YA genre.)

I know, I know, this stuff might be obvious to some of you. But I didn’t realize the functionality was already there, and I sure haven’t tried adding any sort of tags beyond whatever words are already in my synopsis naturally.

Here’s a piece of advice I’m trying to take to heart myself:

Success is not a zero-sum game.

Translation: If someone else’s lousy book does well because it was well-marketed (and likely because it was well-marketed to an audience that was already receptive to it), that doesn’t mean your lesser-known book now has had its audience mulcted from it.