The Analysis Process
Ask
I started with two questions: How can I easily track where I’m getting and reading my books and how can I streamline writing reviews without sacrificing content.
Then I moved on to a bigger question. How can I build something that would help others do that? This solution would need to be cheap, simple, fast, and effective. Most of these people do not make money doing reviews. Even if it is part of an online money project it is a supplemental part and they don’t have a lot of time or money.
I focused on two groups of people as I worked on this project.
First, reviewers. Many reviewers struggle writing robust reviews. This system gives a very flexible structure that also makes it easy to provide reviews that will drive the right readers to authors books.
Second, authors. Reviews are priceless to authors, but getting someone to write a comprehensive review? Nearly impossible. This tool will allow authors to easily provide people a way to leave a review. The thoughts are strictly the readers, but they don’t have to
Prepare
I used data I collected from my Goodreads, Libby, and personal entry. I also build out a Google form so people can gather their own data. This is extremely fresh data, but it is also limited and can be unreliable due to manual input.
Process
You can read my full process here.
In a nutshell, I created a tables tab in the spreadsheet and created tables that showed where I get my books, how I access my books, and who provides the books. I also used the table function to clean up my Sheet1.
When I realized that this was too unreliable and messy, I created the form so answers would be standardized and more easily read by the charts.
Analyze
This is to determine three different factors. Is Audible worth the price? Are the free books worth the time investment on social media? Is NetGalley worth the review time investment?
I used Google Charts to analyze this information:
This image would indicate that Audible would be worth the price, until we look more into where I am getting my Audiobooks from.
The majority of my books are not from Audible. The comparison isn’t even close. The next analysis makes this even clearer.
The amount of Audible Unlimited books are not worth the cost per month. However, on the deal months it is worth getting the $.99 credit to purchase books.
To answer the questions: None of the platforms are worth the money or time if my only goal is to get free books. However, this does not take into account the other factor of why I invest in social media platforms: supporting authors. This is the other facet of the project, the review form.
Share
One of the goals I started with was to create something that was not only useful to me, but would be beneficial to two different groups of people, reviewers and authors. Now I will be sharing these links to several different places:
- Social media platforms
- Tiktok
- Pintrest
- Discord Groups
- Book Tracking platforms
- Fable
- Goodreads
- Storygraph
Act
If you wish to take advantage of this process please look at Google Analytics Capstone and get started!