Hardcover Report for January 2025
By Adam Fortuna
Happy New Year! 🥳
New Years has always been one of my favorite holidays. I use it as a chance to reset, journal, reevaluate priorities and rededicate myself to efforts I’m passionate about.
Some years this works out better than others.
One mindset shift that’s helped me is changing how I rededicate myself each year. Some years I enjoy having specific goals (run a marathon, read 52 books). Other years my focus is on mindset changes (make fitness fun, develop an enjoyable morning routine).
There have been times I’ve tried to set goals without routines only to give up the first week of January because I didn’t “Do X everyday”.
For me, toggling back and forth between these two styles has helped me get unstuck from the lack of momentum preventing progress.
Whatever your hopes are for the new year, I’d encourage you to find a routine that helps you accomplish it. You can even make getting a routine down your goal. Or even take a break from goals this year. If they’re not making you happy, it might be time for something different.
Do you have a goal or routine you want to start in 2025? I’d love to hear about it. ♥️
We celebrated Christmas this year the way we do most years: with a small tree, an exchange of a few presents, and drinking mimosa’s while watching the Disney Christmas Special. 😂
It’s been a somewhat hectic end to the year. Since getting back from vacation in November, I’ve been head down on the Hardcover migration. It’s taken a lot of work, but the end is in sight! More on that below.
Each year I recap what’s happened in my life on my personal blog. Ever since posting on LiveJournal back in college, I’ve enjoyed journaling. I’ve been doing yearly recaps for 15 years now, and it’s another tradition that I enjoy. I just published my personal 2024 Year in Review if you’d like to read more about what I’ve been up to personally this year.
What’s New On Hardcover?
For December, we continued our focus on the new migration. We fixed a few bugs this month, but most of the work has been towards a the big update.
The migration we’re working on is a switch from Next.js to Ruby on Rails for the main application. Our backend was already in Rails, but this move switches the front-end. It’s a major migration of 134 different pages and endpoints that all need to be checked and double checked.
🆕 Staging Server
You can see the progress currently on our Staging Server. If you’re a Supporter, you’ll be able to login and check things out (on days where I haven’t broken that server 😅). I restore this servers database about once every week or two, so if you were a support before 12/20, you’ll be able to login now. Otherwise, the logged out experience is what you’ll be able to check out.
It’s still a work in progress! Bugs can be reported on our Discord in the #staging-feedback channel.
For the techy audience, here’s a server diagram of what we’re planning. This is a major migration from Heroku and Google Cloud to (mostly) Digital Ocean (affiliate link that helps us pay for hosting). I’ve had to learn a bunch about how to host these myself, which has been both fun and a scary. 😅
The costs of self-hosting will save us a decent amount, but it’s only worth it if it results in a faster, more stable website.
I’m excited that this will allow us to scale each piece separately with far fewer bottlenecks.
💻 New API Proxy
If you’re a developer, one thing you’ll notice in this diagram is the API Proxy. This sits in front of our API and acts as a bouncer for bad or aggressive requests.
If you’re not using the API today, you shouldn’t see any changes. If you are, we’ve been discussing the plan for it in the #api channel on Discord. The first phase we implemented last week. Here’s the plan:
Phase 0 (12/30/2024): Move the API behind a proxy, rate limit by user to 60 requests/minute, track API requests to improve speed, disable expensive queries (_iregex _ilike _like _nilike _niregex _nlike _nregex _nsimilar _regex _similar). We’ve also added a 30 second timeout for all queries.
Phase 1 (January 2025): All API tokens will be reset. If you’re using the API, you’ll need to get a new token. New tokens will be good for 1 year, and you can get a new 1-year token at anytime. All other use will be the same. We plan to continue supporting API tokens long-term, so you can plan around this.
Phase 2 (February 2025): Add a GraphQL query depth limit of 3, limit queries to 1 query per request, limit access to other readers data unless they follow you, send queries to a Follower Database to offload work from the primary database.
Phase 3 (first half of 2025): Add OAuth support for granting Hardcover access to external applications.
We’re dedicated to creating a book API that’s free, easy to use and can support your personal projects. We also want to support open source projects that anyone can use that use the API.
If you’re hitting the API more than these limits or working on a commercial project or one that goes beyond these plans, please reach out so we can talk.
🗺️ Hardcover Roadmap
In these monthly reports, I try to limit what we work on to only the past month and the next month. Mostly because I don’t want to get people excited about a feature that might not be released until months from now.
To help with this, last month we started a new Hardcover Roadmap page, where we share what we’re focused on for the next 6 months. We’ve updated this with our current timeline. If you’re curious to see where we’re headed, go check it out.
🎙️ Hardcover Live
We took a break from Hardcover Live (our weekly live show where we build Hardcover in public) to focus on the migration. This has also given us a chance to revisit what we want to use this time for in the new year.
There’s still have more to plan, but we’re aiming to focus on authors next. Less on the writing process side (although I do find that incredibly fascinating), but more on how Hardcover can support authors.
We’re considering this as Season 2 of Hardcover Live, which will start after we complete the current migration.
The Hardcover 2024 Year in Books
At the end of 2023 we launched the Hardcover 2023 Year in Books, a time capsule of what was popular on here during the year.
We’re putting a 2024 Year in Books together now which will part of our big release this month. That’ll also give us a bit of time to see what the most popular books on Hardcover were this year!
Behind the Scenes at Hardcover
This month, we climbed from 195 to 214 supporters and hit 22.5k members! 🥳 About a year ago we calculated this would be the amount of members we’d need to be considered profitable.
Since we made that estimate we’ve added a bunch of new expenses. After this month when we switch servers we should have a clearer look at how close we are to profitability. I think we’re going to be very close, but we won’t know for sure until the end of March.
Here’s an inside peek at the dashboard we use to get a pulse of Hardcover for the day. We’ve added a few migration-related pieces to help understand how close we are.
Want to know what the major spike in traffic was in May? It was Hardy’s Books YouTube video about Hardcover that went viral! A single video had that kind of impact. Imagine what dozens of book influencers could do!
We had $520 in revenue in December 2023, which increased over 2x to $1,274 this December. This may seem a little slow, but it’s been a pace that works for us while being able to scale up all other processes around Hardcover. As much as we’d love Hardcover to grow, if we can’t support new members, respond to readers, interact on Discord, keeping the servers up and running, and have fun doing it then something is wrong.
The current steps we’re taking now will allow us to focus more on marketing in 2025 and not worry that new readers will take down the site. 😅
Featured Prompt for January 2025
Every January lots of new readers make resolutions to start or change your reading habits.
What books are you most looking forward to reading in 2025?
It’s the start of a new year! Whether you’re planning to read authors you love or branch out to new series, it’s a fun time to get excited about what you’ll read next. Which books are you most excited to read in 2025?
Last month’s prompt was The winning book right now is What are some books that should be adapted to the screen? The top two books, Project Hail Mary and Murderbot Diaries are already being adapted. 🥳
Most Read Books for December 2024
Here are the most read books on Hardcover for December.
- Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (#5 in The Stormlight Archive, 36 reads)
- Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson (#4 in The Stormlight Archive, 20 reads)
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (18 reads)
- The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (#1 in The Stormlight Archive, 16 reads)
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey (15 reads)
With the launch of Wind and Truth on December 6th, the entire Stormlight Archive series is being read (and re-read) very actively. At 1,329 pages, it’s the longest in the series – about as long as the entire Lord of the Rings Series and The Hobbit. 😂 I’m half way through Wind and Truth now; taking it in slowly and enjoying every minute.
Side note: Heavenly Tyrant by Xiran Jay Zhao (#2 in Iron Widow) didn’t make the list yet since it came out in late December, but it is #2 on the list of recent releases.
Most Saved Books to be Released in January 2025
Fourth Wing fans have something to look forward to: Onyx Storm is set to be released on January 21, 2025! It’s far and away the most saved book set to be released this month.
- Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (#3 in The Empyrean)
- Water Moon by Samantha Sotto
- Beautiful Ugly: A Novel by By Alice Feeney
- The Crash by Freida McFadden
- A Sea of Unspoken Things by Adrienne Young
After Fourth Wing (#1 in The Empryean) was the most read book on Hardcover from 2023, Onyx Storm will very likely be the most read book released this month.
In some ways the joy and enthusiasm around Fourth Wing reminds me of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Gray. All had some sexual themes and polarized audiences (which I imagine Onyx Storm will continue).
Whatever books you enjoy reading are the books you should read. I echo Brandon Sandersons thoughts from Dragonsteel this year: support readers. Being excited to see someone reading makes them excited to keep reading! I guarantee you, whatever you’re reading I’m excited about. ♥️
I’m also excited to see so many people getting into fantasy through romantasy. And I say that as someone who 5⭐’d ACOTAR and Fourth Wing. 😂
Join us on Discord
The Hardcover Community isn’t just on the website – we’re also on Discord! If you’re not an expert in Discord, don’t worry – neither are we.
Join the over 2,000 readers to chat about books, hear about product updates, and be part of the community.
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We appreciate you reading this and hope you have an amazing month. Talk to you soon. ♥️
Adam & the Hardcover Team