Book Notification Newsletter: August 2025 Recap
 Hi everyone. Welcome to the August 2025 Recap! [Read Online]
August was a fantastic month for Book Notification. We now have over 85,000 audited authors and added a highly requested feature.
I’m very happy with the work the database team has done on our new Book Clubs section over the last month. What we really found interesting was just how difficult it was to get historical picks for some of these book clubs. A lot of the data out there was incorrect, and even the official book club websites included various inaccuracies.
It required many hours of research but it was all worth it in the end – I can confidently say that Book Notification has the best and only accurate book club listing on the entire internet. We’ve got a few more book clubs to add to that section, then the hard work is over with and we will keep it updated with every new book club pick.
We’ve also been focused on adding Lists content in the backend as well. Lists such as the Crime Writer’s Association “Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time”, the BBC “100 Novels That Shaped Our World”, and AbeBooks “50 Essential Science Fiction Books”. This data then shows up on an authors page in their biography area.
This is primarily about adding content to the site which helps increase the site’s health, plus provide interesting trivia notes about authors and their books. While it’s not on our immediate radar, we’ll eventually have a “lists” hub similar to Book Awards and Book Clubs.
Two big new features this month: the highly requested Follow Series option, and a new way to keep track of book adaptations by your favourite authors.
The latter idea came to us in early August, when our Entertainment Editor Vince, asked me if I was aware that a book we had both read and loved, She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper, wasn’t just being adapted for the big screen – but had actually been adapted and released on that day.
I stay up to date on a lot of book news, so it surprised me I hadn’t heard of this. It led to a conversation where, after much research, we realized there isn’t a single one reliable source out there to help readers keep track of book adaptations.
Back in February of this year I wrote in the newsletter that I had started watching the third season of Reacher, and had numerous people reply and thank me for mentioning it, as they were unaware it had premiered.
So we decided that, if there was no reliable source out there for book adaptations, that Book Notification could become that source. One of the members of our database team, Alana, has stepped into the role of Book Adaptations Editor and will be keeping you up to date on adaptations based on books by all of the authors you follow. More on that in the Site Improvements & Updates section.
We’ve officially reached 85,000 authors listed on Book Notification! That’s 85,000 full bibliographies carefully audited and organized. On average, each author takes about 27 minutes to audit, which means thousands of hours of meticulous work. I’m really proud of our database team for the time and effort they put in every single day to help make Book Notification such a valuable resource.
One last thing I would like to mention here; if you appreciate the work we do, please consider supporting us by signing up for the Page Turners Club.
Running Book Notification isn’t free. We have a dedicated team who are keeping authors updated daily with the latest books, auditing and adding authors, building new features to better your experience, and much more.
Unlike sites such as Goodreads, we don’t rely on unpaid volunteers to do 90% of the work. Everyone who works for Book Notification is paid for their time, because we believe in fair work.
If you value what Book Notification brings to your reading life, please consider signing up for the Page Turners Club. It’s $4.99 USD per month or $49.99 for the year, and you get an ad-free experience while supporting the hard work our team does on a daily basis.
Until the next chapter,
Graeme
Book Notification Founder
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Site Improvements & Updates
My Library Upgrade: We have completed a full overhaul to the My Library section of Book Notification. The majority of this was in the backend and providing a faster and better experience for you – especially those users with many followed authors or books read. We also added a few requested user enhancements; the What’s Next page now has a column listing the amount of books left to read in a series, for example. A publication year column has been added in the “My Books” and “Want To Read” lists, and you can now select multiple tags at once.
Follow Series: Users can now choose to follow a series instead of an author. If you read the Alex Cross series by James Patterson for example, but don’t read anything else by him, you don’t need to be notified whenever he releases a new book outside of the Alex Cross series. This would also apply to any series written by multiple authors. This is turned off by default. To enable it, visit Website Settings and then check the box labeled Follow Specific Series:
A new option will now appear beside every series on an author’s page, as indicated below. Click the [+] button:
And that will change to a green checkmark:
If you are currently following the author, you can unfollow them and will only get notifications for new books in that series. You can click the green checkmark to unfollow the series. As always, for any new features please consider it in beta mode and if you run into any issues, just let us know.
Adaptation Updates: In the weekly Tuesday e-mail, adaptation news will now appear or authors you follow. Here is an example screenshot:
We will keep you updated on an adaptation until it has been released. For example, when The Long Walk releases on September 12th, that news item will be removed from all future weekly updates.
There will also be “one time” news. When it was announced that Reacher was based on Gone Tomorrow, that would only be featured in the newsletter once and then removed from future updates. You can choose to disable Weekly Adaptation News from your Email settings. Note that this will be merged with the current Tuesday “new books” email; it will not be a separate email.
New Content Added
In addition to adding authors, we post a lot of book news and book-related content to Book Notification each month. Here are the highlights since the last newsletter:
Monthly Contest
Last month, we held a contest inviting you to post comments on authors pages, and you would earn one entry into the prize draw per comment for 1 of 10 $25 USD Gift Cards. Thank you to everyone who entered.
Here are the winners this month:
- @lindaluvsbooks
- Arch
- DianaB
- Pam Ba.
- stalsma (x2)
- Sandi (email begins with taking.)
- SURDEN7
- Susan Miller
- waterburg72
Quality content and discussion are always beneficial for our website. This month, we are running the comments contest again – asking you to write a comment on an author’s page. It can be whatever you want. You can write about how they are your favourite author, what their best book or series is, or about an adaptation of their book. Any and all comments are welcome.
We will give away ten $25 USD gift cards to random people who have submitted a comment from the day this newsletter was published, up until the beginning of the next newsletter. Each comment earns you an entry (or ‘ticket’) into the draw, and you can enter and win multiple times so comment as often as you’d like!
Members of the Page Turners Club will get an additional entry into the contest.
The comment form is at the bottom of every author’s page, under the title “Author Discussion”.
Thanks to everyone for your support. It’s genuinely appreciated.
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