Hardcover Report for September 2024
By Adam Fortuna
Hi book friends!
Does it feel like summer is flying by for anyone else? As we enter September, students are returning to school, and people are returning from vacations and getting back to work. I’m curious to see how this impacts the Trending Books. Will they change in tone? Will new books take over the top spots? Time will tell.
This past month flew by for me. Often, I’m working on ambitious new product features and trying to release them before writing this report. This month was different. We’ve focused on bugs, reliability, costs, and sustainability.
These aren’t the most exciting topics. 😂 I won’t get as into the weeds as usual about them this month.
On a personal level, it was a stressful month. I’m more experienced in product development than in DevOps and infrastructure, which has meant a lot of learning by doing.
I’ve struggled with prioritizing tasks coming in from many different channels lately. That includes Hardcover tasks (email, Discord, GitHub, DMs, social media) and all my non-Hardcover tasks.
After experimentation, I’ve returned to using Todoist to organize my tasks for a given week. I used to do a “weekly planning” session for myself every Sunday for years. Over a half hour or so, I’d organize my calendar, block off time to work, pick out tasks I wanted to accomplish, and space them out during the week in a possible way.
Part of this also involves staying off Discord more often when I’m not actively working on Hardcover.
So far, this has worked out! I’ve felt accomplished after completing the tasks I set out while not feeling overwhelmed (as much) by everything I’m not doing.
What’s New On Hardcover?
Not very much. 😂 After a very busy July, August was a month of bug fixes and reliability rather than new features.
Over the month, we made 170 commits to the codebase and closed 23 GitHub issues. We have another 110 outstanding issues.
This section is going to be a little bit techy this month. If you’re not interested in a look behind the scenes, please skip to the next section.
Switching to Signed Image URLs
A few weeks ago, someone repeatedly downloaded every cover image on Hardcover. This resulted in 10k requests/second for 8 hours at 600 mb/s, which resulted in a $300 bill. Fortunately, we were able to put together a quick solution using signed URLs (URLs that only work for a specific duration).
You can read the full breakdown of what happened if you’re curious.
Migrated from Vercel to Google Cloud Run
Our hosting costs for Vercel have climbed quite a bit over the last few months despite our traffic being about the same during this timeframe.
One problem is that Vercel’s billing calculation is very different from how we would calculate billing if we just rented server space and hosted from there.
With this in mind, we migrated the main website to Google Cloud Run this month. Despite my efforts and mistakes at every step, it’s running well there. 😅
Side note: I hope to migrate our entire infrastructure to Kubernetes eventually. If you have experience in this and are curious to help, I could use your help!
🔴 Hardcover Live
Earlier this year, we launched the new Hardcover Live, our weekly live show where we build Hardcover in public.
In August, we recorded and released three more episodes, which can be watched on YouTube or downloaded through your podcast player of choice.
Did you know we’re working on stats? 😂 We’re aiming to update the stats page and create a system that allows those stats to be pinned to your Dashboard (which will come after).
Tune in each Wednesday at noon PST to watch us build Hardcover Live. We don’t yet have any guests scheduled for September. Are you an author or a book influencer interested in being on the show? Let me know!
🔜 What’s Next on Hardcover?
September’s focus is on two things: Stats and bugs.
📈 Shareable Stats
I’m very excited about the new stats we’re building. We’re starting this from an exciting standpoint: what questions do you have about your book data?
We’d love to get your feedback on what you want from stats! There are two ways you can help out.
👉 Fill out this 5-minute survey
👉 Sign up for a 30-minute interview with Ste to chat about stats
Either of these will help us prioritize what most people are looking for. Whenever we build something based on feedback, it always ends up 10x better than we could do on our own, and I can’t wait to see what this feedback leads to. 🧭
🐞 Bugs, Server Updates, and Server Costs
We need the codebase to be healthier before taking on new product features. This month, we’ll focus on paying down a lot of technical debt while also preparing to open source Hardcover.
One thing we’ll need to focus on (and I really don’t want to) is protecting the site from bots and scrapers. We have a lot of data and an easy-to-use API, which is very attractive to people building things with AI right now. We want to support people creating fun things with the API, but we need to draw a clear line around data usage and abuse. We have some work to do to ensure what we provide matches our values.
We’re working on some documentation around this, as well as clearer API limits and rules.
The Rest of 2024?
We spent some time as a team figuring this out. We all tend to be rather ambitious, but I’d rather shoot for something exciting, and then if it works out, great!
- Crossword Puzzles!
- Open source Hardcover codebase
- New Stats
- End of Month and End of Year Wrapped
- 2024 Year in Books
- List filtering and bulk edit mode
- New Stats
This isn’t the complete list or the order. I’ll be ecstatic if we complete everything on this list by the end of the year. 🥳
Behind the Scenes at Hardcover
This month, we climbed from 156 to 163 supporters and hit 15k members! 🥳
Unfortunately, when we migrated servers, we had a bug that prevented people from upgrading to supporters for a few days. 🤦 My bad on that one.
If you’re enjoying Hardcover, consider sending your referral link to a friend! You’ll get a free month as a Supporter if two friends join.
Featured Prompt for September 2024
As students return to school, we thought it’d be fun to pick a Prompt focused on learning. What we learn from books isn’t limited to facts and figures, but in how we see the world differently after.
That’s the focus of this months Prompt:
What books did you learn most from?
Whether it’s a course textbook or a fictional romance, we remember books that impact us deeply. Which books do you remember being forever changed by due to learning something new – either about yourself, the world or a new skill?
Add your own answers or upvote some of the existing ones. I’m excited to see what books you’ll learned the most from. 🙌
Last month’s Prompt was, “What books brought you out of a reading slump?” The top votes so far are for Mistborn, Legends & Lattes, and The Martian—all entertaining and fun books that I rated 5 ⭐.
Most Read Books for August 2024
Three of this month’s trending books are 2023 releases. The other two, The Three Body Problem and Dune, were adapted into movies and series this year.
- Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson
- Yellowface By R.F. Kuang
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
- Dune by Frank Herbert
You have to go all the way down to #13, The Mercy of the Gods by James S. A. Corey (The Expanse), to find the first book released in 2024. Summer seems to be the time for readers to catch up on the popular books they missed the previous year.
The top 3 books of this month were the top 3 most read new books of 2024! This mirrors what happened with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as well as Project Hail Mary both picked up even more momentum after being featured in year-end reviews.
Most Saved Books to be Released in September 2024
- A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft (72 saves)
- Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio (27 saves)
- Celestial Monsters by Aiden Thomas (25 saves)
- We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (23 saves)
- Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma (22 saves)
A Dark and Drowning Tide tops the list with 72 saves. Bridging multiple genres, it looks like it has something for everyone: a murder mystery set in dark academic fantasy with a rival trope and kingdom-level problems. Look for it on September 17th.
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 1,000 others to chat about books, hear about product updates, and be part of the community.
Want to Support Hardcover?
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We appreciate you reading this and hope you have an amazing month. Talk to you soon. ♥️