Thank you for asking us another question in our question round celebration Jenf 🙂
Jenf: I’d love to learn how you manage the polls. Do you have an app or software that tracks everything (which books to included, the votes etc)? Or is it more of a manual process
Dan:
Thanks for asking, and thanks for voting!
Dani and I got together back in late 2014 and decided to offer the polls as a way of giving those books that we rated with a 4.5 or 5.0 Love Bytes rating, one more avenue to be seen. It is a totally manual process and takes a little while to do each time. I use our website’s Book Reviews and By Rating sub-menus to create the Book of the Week Poll, and then within WordPress use the poll creation option to create the physical polls you see at the bottom of the poll posts. Those votes are totaled by the software, so thankfully I don’t have to hand count them!
I do a lot of copying and pasting of the reviews themselves and tend to work using WordPress, Word and multiple copies of the Love Bytes site all open at the same time. I’m always careful not to miss any books rated high enough for the poll. As you have probably noticed, the Book of the Week top two winners from each week move forward to the Book of the Month poll and then the top two winners of those go on to the Book of the Year poll.
We recently broke the Audio reviews off to their own poll, which you might have seen. It will work the same way as the Book of the Week poll, but be on a monthly basis. The top two from that poll will move on to the Audio Book of the Year poll. Because we aren’t doing a huge number of Audio Reviews, for now every Audio Book we review ends up on the poll. That might change down the road if we have a lot more come through. They are very popular with some of our reviewers so I expect that poll to grow.
I consider the polls my best contribution to the blog since I joined it in 2014. I’m really happy to hear that you like the polls. Rest assured, we will be continuing them.
Thank you for the question and for the answer. Really interesting. I love the polls. Sometimes there are books on the list I haven’t heard about, but I love getting to know new authors. Sometimes they are my absolute favorite reads as well.
Great question and very interesting answer. I think the polls are great. It’s a great way to interact with a topic and see results and very easy to take part in so I love them. I also haven’t read a fair few of some books included so if they get a higher percentage than the ones I vote for it makes me go and check them out – found a fair few great new reads that way. 🙂
Thanks for having the polls, it’s such a fun feature that’s unique to Love Bytes.
I love the polls. Thanks for having them and all the work it takes.
Thanks for the answers. Interesting question, I never really thought about how polls work.
I love the polls, especially when it finishes and I can see how the books I’ve read ‘stack up’ to other readers opinions!
The polls are always intriguing, and it’s good to know how they work!
Interesting to learn more about the polls. I’ve only now started looking at them (been coming to LoveBytes for about a year, but this anniversary series has got me looking at more things, so great). I guess I was surprised about the manual parts of it, but understandable when I saw it was all but the counting. I know how that goes, since I’ve done polling for companies. I haven’t voted on a poll yet, because I haven’t read the books. I might if there was a poll about what top book y’all have reviewed that I’d be most interested in as a tbr (hint, hint, 🙂
I vote each week and month – thanks for all the effort Dan!
More complicated than I thought. Thanks for answering this interesting questions in length.
Thanks for sharing how you manage the polls. It sounds like a lot of work and a lot of effort goes into it.
Thanks for that detailed answer to my question, Dan! And thank you for all the effort you put into the polls. They are so much fun and it is great to see the authors recognized. I do like that you broke the audiobooks out into their own poll because the audio experience definitely has a different angle to it.
Thank you for the answer, Dan. It sounds like a lot of work, but the result is really worth it!
The polls are great. I get a lot of new reading material from these. Also thanks for the answer Dan. I bet a lot of us didn’t realise how much hard work went into them.
Wow, that takes a lot of work!! Thanks for sharing this with us…
I think they’re pretty cool and fun