Nantucket E-Books: 2023 in Review
NOTE: This post is a copy of a recent post to Patreon.
Dear Nantucket E-Books Patrons,
I’d like to take a moment to review some accomplishments from 2023. These accomplishments could not have been made without your moral and financial support, so thank you.
* This year marked the first commercial titles on the site: Small Things, The Poetry of Allie Flint, Tales of a Metal Fisherman by Buffalo, and The Woethief by Seth Patterson. Customers could pre-order the e-book and have their names listed as supporters, or could order a comb-bound paperback edition. Credit card payments were processed via Stripe.
* Version 4.0 of the platform was released. This included new formatting for poetry, more readable HTML, an optimized stylesheet, and the ability to toggle between serif and sans-serif fonts. A new sans-serif font is used for the e-books: Atkinson-Hyperlegible.
* PUBLIC EVENTS: The book-launch for Tales of a Metal Fisherman was held in Cope, Colorado in March, and I gave a live reading of An Affair at Grover Station at the actual Grover Depot Museum in August.
* This was the first full year for Quarter Up, the platform’s newsletter for pinball and retro arcade gaming. Quarter Up has proven very popular: five of the platform’s top-six most-viewed books are Quarter Up issues. I worked with writers and authors all over the country, and readers and liking their work.
* I wrote an analytics script for the site. This replaces the prior PHP hit counter and directly parses the server access log. This has allowed me to improve the site by re-directing dead links, tracking book performance over time, and finding which images and audio files need better compression. This script is being continuously improved.
* The menu icons in the e-books were removed and replaced with text.
* I found ways to improve the SVG files used for cover images, embedding the fonts for text as Base64 data. This makes the text for SVG covers appear consistent across browsers.
* This year’s Halloween livestream was the poem Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene, from the gothic novel The Monk.
A productive year, I’d say. I will be following this post up with my plans for 2024.
Happy New Year,
NJB
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