allansturm's Posts

I SENT THIS TO BLURB:

The bookstore metrics are seriously lacking detail. I’m sure there are reasons (i.e. database access, manpower, etc.).

My suggestion is to allow a book author to paste in a code block from Google Analytics into a form field. This code block in turn is automatically added to the public facing page’s code block (PHP?) for the footer. Then Google Analytics can track the book, offering your authors a more real-time analysis.

Why go through this trouble? In my case, I’m in the early stages of promoting my book – grass roots style – as I would assume many of your authors are doing. When I contact a blog author or website owner interested in soft-promoting my book, I have absolutely NO way of determining the success. To give this more perspective, being a POD author, I have the unhappy reality of having to purchase my own copies——so, the question of whether or not I plunk down $30 and mail one to the blog/website author or not becomes an issue.

I can imagine that the Blurb.com Web developers will immediate scream Security Issue, BUT.. a simple comparison of the code being pasted in and submitted can be easily accomplished, rejecting a bad copy-paste or rejecting anything not fitting Google’s format. This is NOT hard and is done every day in back-end Web development.

An example code block from google for one of my sites:

[EXAMPLE GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODE BLOCK]

and exists on a page just before the final body tag.

Easy, adds unprecedented analytics features to your author’s public book page… and most importantly, it’s a win win scenario.

BLURB RESPONSE:

Hello Allan,

Thanks for this suggestion. I will pass it along to our development team and let them mull this idea around.

We appreciate your help here!

Thanks again,

Jay
Customer Support

Having a closer look (at something I would’ve thought was a given)... it appears that the Booksmart program designers decided to FORCE use to use various layouts depending on left or right of binding. I have the need for a string of pages that have 6up with text captions… but apparently this page layout style is only available left of binding… This does not appear to happen with a page template that has a single photo with white space, caption, head and footer… no wonder the pages were thinking it should be aligning the text to the binding because it thinks it’s a left edge page, but it’s actually right of the binding…. Any hacks that anyone knows would be most appreciated. Even if I have to get in and hack the XML files.