A New Year – Get Started With Book Review Statistics!

Happy 2013 everyone! It’s a new year and the perfect time to start keeping track of a few book review statistics! I coded these for myself out of curiosity, and thought other people might be interested!

Basically I made myself a WordPress plugin that automatically calculates statistics about my book reviews. So far I have done one for calculating the rating distribution for books I’ve reviewed, one for calculating the source distribution, and one for calculating the genre distribution.

Here’s what it looks like

To get these tables to show up, all I do is use shortcodes like this:

[ratingstats year="2012"]

[sourcestats year="2012"]

And all the calculations get taken care of for me! No manually counting every single book review—nada!

Here’s how it works

On the WordPress admin side, I have boxes like this on the post creation page:

Every time I write a new book review, I simply check the box(es) for the source and select a rating. This is how everything gets stored in the database for each review. Then, if you want to display the statistics, all you do is use the shortcodes I listed above! You can enter in a year into the shortcode, or just leave it blank to show the statistics for “all time”.

Note that book reviews will not be counted in the statistics until you fill out the boxes! So unless you go back and fill them out for your old pre-2013 reviews, those cannot be calculated.

Want the plugin?

If you’re interested in having this plugin on your blog, download the plugin file here:

Then upload it as a new plugin on your WordPress blog. Once it’s activated, when you create a new post, new boxes will appear on the right-hand side. You’ll have to add all the sources/ratings you want at first, but after that they’ll always be saved and you can just check the one(s) you want to associate with each book review. E-mail me if you have any questions!

Want something custom?

If you want any kind of custom statistics other than ratings, sources, or genres, e-mail me with a description of what you want and I’ll code it and set it up for you for probably around $5 – $10 USD, but ultimately it depends on how easy or complex it is!

Note: In my version, the ratings tab shows the actual graphics of each rating. In the version I’m giving away, it would be a purely textual display (i.e. “5 Stars”, “4 Stars”).