Review notification

I have several books. It would be highly convenient if I received a notification of a new review rather than me having to go through all of them to check if any of my books got a new review.

Hello. I am not sure you can do that as an author on LT. Perhaps you should read the following link, which tells you what you can do if you sign up to be an author on LT. You might find more answers there. Best wishes, k4k

https://www.librarything.com/about/authors

It's not as good as a notification, but in our catalog view, for you this would be at:
https://www.librarything.com/catalog/aithal

Over on the right-hand side, the speech bubble symbol shows the number of reviews on each book.

So you could take a note of this number, by writing it into your Comments or Private Comments column, and then you can see at a glance if it has gone higher than last time you checked. If that's any use as an alternate method than looking through each book manually.

If it helps, you can go to Home > Reviews > Reviews for your books, and see sort by date to see the most recent reviews for books in you catalogue.

Obviously, this doesn’t discriminate between books you’ve written and ones you’ve merely catalogued.

If Home > Reviews > Reviews for your books would allow the user to specify a collection, that would work great for the stated purpose. (It would require putting the author's own books in a discrete collection, but that's trivial.)

Only books the author has cataloged is their own

You can also keep track of the reviews on the author page. The table of "Rating Statistics" also includes the number of reviews for each work.

Keeping an eye on this would also let the author see if books have been entered that need to be combined into a work.

I think we need a "Follow" option for books, so you can get updates of this nature.

>8 timspalding:

If you also got Talk mentions, or at least Abouts, for the followed books, that would be very cool.

I think that would be a very good reason to stop reviewing and to stop using touchstones.

>10 MarthaJeanne: Why? You wouldn't get any notifications unless you 'follow' a book.

I don't want notifications going out about my reviews. If someone wants to come to the site to check on reviews, that's very different from notifications being sent out.

>12 MarthaJeanne: notifications being sent out

I don't think emails are being contemplated. It seems to me just like a refinement of the existing functionality of Home > Reviews > Reviews for your books. Why is that firehose better than a more selected stream?

>12 MarthaJeanne: If the notification says "a review was added" without a snippet of the review or the reviewer's name, I don't see a problem...

If the reviewer's name is included (or part of the review), that can cause some... issues - i.e. someone posts a review by mistake and delete one and/or decides not to hold their tongue and add some details they initially decided to politely omit -- I can see an author coming to bug you to either repost the review (even if it was never for their book or the reviewer simply decided not to have a review) or edit it to what it was or something.

It seems less intrusive than being able to follow a user account to see all of their reviews, which is already a thing one can do.

SandraArdnas (#11):

I'm not MarthaJeanne, but I don't relish the thought of making it easy for authors - or rabid fans of a book - to come after everyone who writes a slightly critical review.

Yeah, I shared a flippant but fair criticism review from librarything to twitter and the author must have been searching their name on twitter and QTed it to have a go at me to all their fans, who of course replied to me, it wasn't a great experience.

>17 Aquila:

Twitter is pretty notorious for that sort of thing. I don't think a new feature would transform LT into Twitter.

LibraryThing is fairly author-unfriendly, compared to other sites. This is a common complaint about us, and one I almost welcome. A small minority of author's don't know how to behave. I have no desire to introduce that sort of dynamic here. But I don't think this would do that.

>1 aithal: +1 but likely not something that would happen for a couple years or more, if implemented at all. In the meantime there are ways to track web pages (like # reviews) for changes and in your scenario I would recommend visualping. I've used it since 2021 without any complaints.

>8 timspalding: +1

>17 Aquila: Lol, ah the price of free speech. When you put something out into the public sphere you'd better be able to handle the richochet. ;-)

>16 lorax: As far as authors, I'm sure they are all obsessively checking their book's page anyway, so if you post a review they are going to see it.

>21 rosalita: Actually, there are a fair number of drive-by authors who never come back.

I'm not really concerned about the ones who do come back regularly.

>18 paradoxosalpha: I know, and I am used to it on twitter - but it is why I'm glad Tim keeps librarything the way it is.

>16 lorax: But we don't have the possibility of responding to a review, which leaves just private messages. Pretty sure it's against the TOS to harass people for any reason. Besides, rabid fans and authors, if so inclined, can already check new reviews for their pet book easily. This would just make it easier to follow a selection of books, not just one or five

>24 SandraArdnas: Besides, rabid fans and authors, if so inclined, can already check new reviews for their pet book easily. This would just make it easier to follow a selection of books, not just one or five

Just so!

>22 MarthaJeanne: But drive-by authors would never get notified if they aren't visiting the site. I presume the new notifications system would be the vehicle for this feature.

>17 Aquila: If that was a sellf published author, you should find out if they were a member of ALLi (Alliance of Independent Authors and Illustrators) because that is expressly against their code of conduct.