The website that we built for the competition has seen 27,000 visits and 824 entries from 4,000 users, who have made a phenomenal 6,500 comments, making it the biggest ever competition for Mills & Boon and Harlequin, and proving definitively that romance actually isn’t dead.

Aspiring authors were asked to submit the first chapter of their Mills & Boon novel for a chance to win the ultimate prize of seeing their book published by Mills & Boon, an editor for a year, and an Apple iPad. Three runners up will win a consultation with a Mills & Boon editor, a Sony eReader and a hamper of Mills & Boon books. The winners will be chosen by public vote and a panel of judges: Heat editor Sam Delaney, author Penny Jordan, Mills & Boon’s managing director Mandy Ferguson and executive editor Tessa Shapcott.

Shapcott said: “In the past few years we have acquired at least half a dozen new authors by way of contests. And it’s not just confined to the winners. That’s why I am looking forward to New Voices and the joys of discovering those fresh sparks.”

Those ten fresh sparks are Blood Roses by Lindsay J Pryor; The Boss’ Naughty Assistant by Cady Phelan; Help Wanted: Apply for Love by Carrie Spencer; The Royal Marriage Rescue by Kara Jacobe; A Russian Affair by Lucy Snowe; The Secret Duchess by Sharon Siddoway; Secrets and Speed Dating by Leah Ashton; The Surgeon and the Cowgirl by Heidi Hormel; Thigh Noon by Kat Cantrell and Wildsong by Jill Lynn Anderson.

The response on the website, twitter and facebook has been remarkable: You can read them all here and our favourites include Tonia Lendich, who posted:

“I echo the thoughts of others here – what a fantastic opportunity this has been. Such diversity, such talent and such reasoned and reasonable comment on most of the entries [...]Thank you Mills & Boon – please do it again next year!”

And Mavis Smyth, who wrote:

“Dilemma …. I’ve got more than 10 favourites! I wonder if the M&B Team are struggling too? :) Good luck to everyone who gets through today … given there were so many entries, I’d say you are very very lucky.”

And this comment from Susan Standen:

“This is as exciting as Christmas morning. I can’t wait to come online later in the day and see which ten made it through. I wonder if it will be my favourites?”

The overall winner will be announced on 1st November 2010. In the meantime, you can read the first chapters of the shortlisted titles here. Just maybe not on your work computer.

The site had a single purpose: to recommend new books to readers who have just finished something. It would be as simple as Google: a search box asking for the last book you read (and enjoyed). The site would then go and query Amazon, Librarything and other booky API services, and deliver you some recommendations for what to read next. Very simple.

We (well, James) built it quite quickly, and I blogged the results after the pretty insane first month.

And now the dust has settled, I thought I’d update that with some stats for the first 10 months.

Who Visits Bookseer?

Since launch (June 1, 2009) until April 21st, 2010, we’ve had 739,565 visits, 592,969 of which are absolutely unique. 1,839,702 pageviews have been recorded (2.49 pages per view) and a bounce rate of 40.41%.

Across all visitors, there is an average stay of 1m 27 seconds, and 80% of our visitors are first-timers here. Here’s where they come from:

• 519,249 are from the USA (mostly California, then New York, then Texas)
• 47,879 are from Canada (really evenly spread out actually)
• 42,143 are from the UK (overwhelmingly, London)
• then it’s Brazil, Australia, Russia, Germany, Ireland….

What is also interesting is the difference in usage shown by the different type of visitors. There are two main types of visitors: those who are “referred” to the site by a link on another site (e.g. Stumbleupon) and those who find the site through search.

People who search organically for “what should i read next” and find Bookseer.com have a significantly lower bounce rate (27%), spend twice as long on the site (3m 23s) and view almost four pages, when compared to the average. We think this shows that these visitors have a genuine interest in finding another book.

Encouragingly, these visitors have increased a lot in the past few months. There is also some amazing loyalty: 5.47% of users visited the site more than 9 times. 2% visited the site over 100 times!

Most Popular Books

Without further ado, here are the most popular recommendations asked of the Bookseer in the past 10 months:

1. Twilight (15,260)
2. Harry Potter (11,438)
3. The Help (6,945)
4. 1984 (6,510)
5. The Road (4,286)
6. On The Road (2,195)
7. Breaking Dawn (3,559)
8. The Time Traveler’s Wife (3,381)
9. Pride and Prejudice (3,176)
10. The Bible (2,859)
11. Fight Club
12. The Lovely Bones
13. Enders Game
14. Catcher in the Rye
15. My Sisters Keeper
16. The Lost Symbol
17. The Perks of Being A Wallflower
18. Atlas Shrugged
19. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
20. Water for Elephants
21. Brave New World
22. The Book Thief
23. Lolita
24. The Catcher in the Rye (note double entry with above)
25. The Great Gatsby
26. Lord of the Rings
27. The Dispossessed

and many more. Note that these appear to be genuine searches (rather than being distorted, for example by referrals from popular sites direct to results pages). The only title to receive more than 1,000 page views as a landing page is The Dispossessed, just outside the top 20.

Obviously the two big titles are the Twilight and Harry Potter series. I find it interesting that whilst people search on a book name (”Twilight”) for Stephenie Meyer, they do a generic one for J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter” is, obviously, not the name of a book.

I have a little theory that many people come to the site and test out their favourite book and see what comes back. In fact, I’m certain that’s what lots of people do, and this is why we have such a diverse spread of titles (over 104,000 different books have been entered into the Bookseer).

I’m delighted that the top 10, whilst influenced by Meyer and Rowling, contains some of the greatest works of literature from the 20th and 21st Century. The Road? On the Road? 1984? What a literate bunch of people with great taste inhabit the site.

I am also amazed and thrilled that we have had 104,886 different pages viewed in the period since launch. Ignoring the home page, I think that means we have had 104,883 different titles entered into the system.

And, whilst you might think lots of them have just been entered once (by the author?!) it is not until the 44,008th title (”كتاب السير”) that we start to see single searches. It’s pure long-tail stuff.

Oh and The Bible is quite a fun one, in terms following the author names attached to it:

• God
• Jesus
• King James
• Various
• Jesus Christ
• Peter
• Moses
• Anonymous
• Richard Dawkins
• The Apostles
• Many authors

Why (and how?) do People Come to Bookseer?

96% of our traffic comes from referrals, and only 4% comes from search. This is a bit disappointing, and we should work on that.

Search falls into two camps – branded and non-branded keywords.

• Branded – 70% of search terms are around ‘book seer’ (or a derivative).
• Non-branded / organic search: ‘what should I read next’ or ‘i’ve just finished reading’ (and derivatives) account for 30% of search (1.23% of visits)

.

As of today, bookseer is ranked no 8 for ‘what should I read next‘. The most common “non-branded” search terms, i.e. stripping out variants on “bookseer” are:

• what should i read next
• what to read next
• what book should i read
• what book should i read next
• what should i read next?
• what should i read
• i just read what should i read next

Which is great as this demonstrates the need that the bookseer is trying to fulfil. What’s also interesting is the impressive growth of these terms in the last 6 months:

Referrals

Stumbleupon sends a whopping 56.47% of traffic our way. I know very little about stumbleupon but that’s a huge slice of our visitors. Thanks to whoever is involved in that!

In terms of referrals, Lifehacker sent a chunk of traffic (16,745) but pretty much all in one day. Facebook sent 11,114, and Twitter 6,539.

I find this last particularly interesting as on March 5th of this year, Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly publishers, and with just under 1.5m followers on twitter) tweeted Bookseer:

I follow Tim, and dreaded it when I saw this – expecting it to fireball our server – but in fact only 210 visits came from Twitter on March 5th. Not sure what this suggests about our site, or Twitter, but I would have expected Tim’s followers to be bookish types who might follow the link. As it is I think it’s 0.015% of Tim’s total readership.

%age of visitors who actually submit a search

Many websites have a majority of visitors who come to the home page and then go away again without actually doing anything. So we thought we’d compare people who come to the site without actually putting in a book, and those who ask for a recommendation. Kind of a test of how good the home page is:

The number of visitors who actually search for something remains at a steady 50%. Not too bad, really. In the above chart, non-searches is visitors who didn’t look for a book, and searches is the ones who did: they’re roughly equal!

(Those who don’t search either just come to the site and “bounce” off again, without engaging any further; or who enter the site via a link to a results page [example])

Popularity by Region

We did some data wrangling to breaks out visits by Territory then Page Title, to see if there is a difference in popular titles in a given country. We extracted top 10 title data for each country in turn, for any time period, and thus saw trends for top titles in each country for any time period.

As an example, here’s a table of successful searches by country (USA):

Drilling down in the US gives us a list of top 10 book titles; we need to filter these by result pages to get:

Clicking on Twilight gives us the trending graph:

…and we can see that searches for Stephenie Meyer’s vamprance (rompire?) were rather popular in the lead-up to the US film release date in November last year.

Obviously the USA is a huge share of our audience – if there is interest we’ll show UK only titles up here by comparison.

Next Steps

I hope you found this interesting – we did. And it’s made us think a bit, and try a few things out.

So, here’s what we’re going to try and do next:

• Work on the page ranking to try and improve bookseer.com’s search visibility on a search for the non-branded, organic terms such as “What should I read next“
• Consider social features, such as adding Twitter and Facebook linking on each page, so that people can ‘like’ the recommendations. Compliment this by creating a facebook page for BookSeer.
• Use the Bookseer Twitter account more. We’ve been having some fun with this, making recommendations inspired by topical events.
• Consider a mobile app? Some ideas have included the ability to take a photo of an ISBN and get back recommendations immediately. So for example if you’re in a bookshop, you “scan” a book with your phone camera and get back recommendations. Last I heard, Amazon had banned the use of their data in mobile apps

Got any other requests for data or features? Let us know below.

Visit the Bookseer
Follow the Bookseer on Twitter
More about the bookseer

Watch a short film about the data we capture from ebook apps.

This feature has basically taken the place of the previous “links” that appeared in the RSS feed, but which are not visible on the main site.

Over here in the left hand side is a page called “Reading“. This page automatically polls our combined Instapaper accounts to bring back the articles that we have found most interesting of late.

Instapaper is an awesome browser plugin / combined iPhone app that allows you to save long web pages for offline reading. So as we’re scouring the web, but find ourselves too busy to actually read pieces (on which note more soon), those we find particularly interesting are saved here.

After the jump you’ll find the video of the talk, along with details of a five-minute Ignite! session Peter also gave on in-app analytics.

Peter Collingridge: Enhancing the ebook

For full transcript and slides, visit the Enhanced Editions blog

Peter Collingridge: Analytics Wakeup Call

For full transcript and slides, visit the Enhanced Editions blog

A pecha kucha has to be really fast – your 21 prepared slides run automatically in 20 second increments for a total of 7 minutes – and great fun. The event was impeccably organised by Jon Slack and Doug Wallace under the aegis of the Society of Young Publishers. They recently repeated the format for a third time and I recommend you to go to the fourth.

The brief was open, and for some reason I decided I wanted to talk about failure. The logic being that I thought that given that I was speaking to a room mainly composed of young publishers or students trying to enter the industry, I would share my extensive professional experience of disappointment and shattered dreams. Not in a bid to break their spirits, you understand, but to encourage them to try and be recklessly ambitious and hopelessly idealistic at the beginning of their careers – especially if someone else is underwriting those failures. It’s a twist on the old “silver lining” story but hopefully enough to be inspiring.

The pecha kucha format is unforgiving to hyperbole and imminent failure (technical or emotional) haunts the speaker. Terrifyingly, I was first up as well which didn’t help the nerves.

Anyway, the video has just been put online, which is below. My notes from the talk are also available if you can’t see what’s on screen.

Sorry about the horrific thumbnail photo.

Also available is Jamie Byng’s talk, my old boss at Canongate, who was next up on stage. We didn’t know what the other was talking about so when I gave a slide about being his “gimp”, that was meant in the nicest possible way. Here’s his talk:

For more details on the event, here’s a post I wrote at the time.

The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave is the first Enhanced Editions title, and contains everything you’d expect from a top-notch ebook experience: tilt scrolling, customisable fonts and text sizes, full-text search, bookmarking, and clean, clear navigation.

But we’ve also added Enhanced Editions goodness – as well as the complete text of the novel, the app comes with the full audiobook, read by Nick Cave – synced with the text, so you can switch from audio to text without losing your place. There’s also an exclusive soundtrack and videos of Nick reading from the book. There’s even an in-app news feed, keeping you up to date with news and reviews, as well as invitations to exclusive events.

As well as comissioning another film (above) from our good friends at Asylum – who made This Is Where We Live – we’ve also launched a new site at enhanced-editions.com.

Here we’re highlighting all the great titles coming in the next few months – including books by Barack Obama and David Simon, creator of The Wire – and talking about some of the new features and design decisions on the blog.

For example, want to know more about syncing the audiobook, serif vs sans-serif fonts, icon design, or our position on epub and DRM? It’s all on the blog. Go take a look.

We first built a website for Portobello Pictures in 2005, working with Angus Hyland and Fabian Herrmann at Pentagram to design the site. Taking its lead from the dimensions of a cinema screen, the site is designed to feel like a private viewing at a Soho cinema, with a slideshow accompanying each production.

We’ve now added a full CMS so that Portobello can add their own content, as well as the stills and films alongside it. So you can watch the trailers for their Academy Award and Golden Globe Award-winning film Kolya, or family favourite Danny the Champion of the World, as well as highlights from their extraordinary South African stage adaptation of Mozart: The Magic Flute – Impempe Yomlingo, and much more besides.

Go check out the new Portobello Pictures site…

There is a set of photos on Flickr.

(Includes horrid picture of Noel Fielding from the Boosh’s arse crack).

[Written as part of our visit to India with the British Council. All such posts will be listed in a dedicated category; apologies if this isn't of interest. If it is of interest, then you can also see more on our Flickr set]

Tina and Tarun were talking about Tina’s new web-only venture, The Daily Beast, which launched in the run-up to the American election last year. Tarun is the editor of Tehelka, India’s leading political, weekly journal.

Tina – previous editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk, and author of two biographies (Princess Diana and Hillary Clinton) – focused her talk on three beasts:

1. America. The biggest beast of them all.
2. India.
3. The journalistic crisis around the world, particularly in the US.

I found the entire talk fascinating, but these are the notes I wrote.

- She had just left Washington and the inauguration. She described walking back, with a sea of people behind her – and how such a sea of people had not been seen since 9/11, and in fact reminded her of it. She then described the inauguration as “9/11 in reverse…. as if a curse had been lifted” and that the Bush years had been like a curse, bookended by these seas of people.

- She used a phrase that I hadn’t heard before, of Barack Obama as the first “black berry president”. Ho ho.

- She said that in her experience, it takes three scoops before a publication is taken seriously. She described it her job to get those three scoops, which have the net effect of making readers uneasy if they don’t have your publication (and are therefore unable to talk about it first). That unease is great, from a publisher’s perspective.

- Of her choice to move to the web, she talked about the “unwieldily distribution” of magazines, and the speed and agility of publishing online. She also talked of its massive reach – the Daily Beast gets 2 million unique visitors per month, and 11m page views per month – and how this had been achieved in a very short time.

- I was surprised to hear her give less credit to The Huffington Post [TDB's most obvious competitor; during the election I flitted from one to the other on an hourly basis]. She was perhaps a little snarky about HuffPo’s editorial credentials, suggesting that the articles aren’t finished, researched, subbed or even proofed to the rigorous standards of TDB.

On the whole TB came across as incredibly smart and super-articulate, and obviously a media powerhouse. I am personally fascinated by the fact that someone of her skills, reach and credentials has chosen the web for her new venture, when she could have had the choice of any medium, and indeed backer.

Some really, really exciting news: the astonishingly A-list TED conference, which has just wrapped up in California, asked to show our 25th Estate film, This is Where We Live and to put it on the DVD given to delegates in the goodie bag.

Of course we said yes! Speakers include Tim Berners Lee, Bill Gates, Olafur Eliasson, Seth Godin, Herbie Hancock, Golan Levin, Daniel Libeskind, Ollie Sacks and, um, Jamie Cullum.

Meanwhile the film is edging towards 200,000 views. You can watch it here: