How to Get the Most out of Your Time on BookSky

The BlueSky thread I did about this a while back was quite popular, so I wanted to expand on it and update it with some new recommendations for you.

1) Be really, really generous with your hearts/reposts/comments on other people's content. See someone posting your favorite book ever? Tell them that! Love someone's aesthetic shelfie pics? Heart their posts. Find someone's observations about a notorious fantasy author extremely funny and accurate? Repost it. Interaction is what makes social media social and if you're craving interaction on your posts and/or internet friendships, interacting with other people will get you there faster. Interaction also incentivizes the people who are posting the kind of content you like to keep posting. Nobody likes posting into a void, and everyone likes attention on the internet.

2) Be the kind of poster you want to see on BookSky. The number one question (aside from "how do I get rid of all the ads?") BookSky users have is often "why aren't there more ____ posts?" and the answer to that is "because people like you aren't posting!" Passively consuming content is way less fun than actively participating in your social networks. If you want more science fiction posts in SFF feed, you should be posting your own science fiction book posts. If you wish the Horror Books thread had more posts about niche horror authors, you can start that trend today. Social media networks are extremely memetic so it would actually be very easy for you to make a certain kind of content or post trendy on BookSky. A few dedicated posters could easily make 'Sunday Scaries' (where everyone posts the scariest book in their collection) happen or whatever example would fit your desired genre/niche! You can start a trend, I believe in you.

3) Stop posting so many advertisements. Basically the only two rules of BookSky is 1) all posts must be related to books or reading and 2) your self promotional posts may not outnumber your other posts to the feeds. Currently, almost every author is in violation of the second rule and this has begun to cause a lot of problems for both readers (who are annoyed at the constant ad spam) and authors (interaction on their posts are way, way down). From what I can tell, the authors who are converting the most BookSky readers into customers are the ones who are using BookSky more like a normal reader than like an advertiser. You are not gaining followers or interaction on your posts by mindlessly posting ads. Someday, I hope to have moderation tools to effectively manage this issue, but it's a pretty thorny problem from both a moderation and a technical point of view and has been extremely time consuming. So far, I've built some ad-free beta versions of BookSky feeds that are really popular with Patreon members and feel like how BookSky used to feel prior to the incessant ad spam.

4) Tell me if if you see someone spamming the feed, whether that's a bot or a human poster! The main BookSky feed alone gets 2-3 thousand posts a day so please tag the BookSky admin account if you see someone posting irrelevant or spammy content. It's very helpful if you include a screenshot of the offending post and the user's handle when you tag me so that I can ban or remove them even if they delete the post or block the admin account.

5) If you're not finding what you're looking for on the main BookSky feed, try one of the sub genre feeds instead. There are over a dozen feeds in the BookSky network (and I plan to add more every time we hit a Patreon milestone). Did you know that there's a feed that only permits image or video posts and browses like a bookish version of Instagram? Did you know that there's a feed only for discussion of books with no advertisements allowed? Did you know there's a feed for the BookTok community? Did you know there's a historical fiction feed?

6) If you care about the future of BookSky, join us on Patreon! Patrons get ad free browsing, access to secret feeds, voting privileges on new feeds and features with lots more perks in the works. Your support makes the BookSky feeds (and this website) possible. Currently, the Patreon does not even cover the costs of hosting this website and feeds (let alone time spent on moderation, creating new feeds etc.) but I hope we can get there with your support.