Getting Digital PR links with Book Trends

This is how I built 'Bookle Trends' in less than 20 minutes. 👇

It's a Google Trends clone to track topic mentions in books, with advanced search functionality and history dating back 50+ years.

+ How you can use it to secure some insane digital PR links for your own sites 🔗 pic.twitter.com/s7JLylYSek

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

I first came across the OpenLibrary API in a campaign centred around 'The World's Most Written About Cities'. Credit to @ilikeyoumatt for the idea 👏🏼.

OpenLibrary is part of Archive(.)org and offers various ways to access the data from their collection of 20M+ books.

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

Here's how you can use the tool for your own niche specific digital PR campaign:

- Tech: View mentions of AI over time.

- Baby: Compare the use of peoples names over time.

- Pets: View the number of books published about dogs over time. Can compare breeds + types.

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

- Travel: Report on the popularity of a destination/compare its growth to a similar place.

- Fashion: Track popularity of clothing items over time (e.g. skinny jeans vs flares).

- Health: Find mentions of ailments over time (increase/decrease).

The possibilites are endless.

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

Want to get technical?

Bookle Trends supports the OpenLibrary solr query spec. Think of these as the equivalent of Google Advanced Search Operators.

Operators you can use for digital PR include:

- 'place:'
- 'title:'
- 'subject:'

You can even combine them using AND, OR, NOT. pic.twitter.com/Nxxhbg194Y

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

The best thing about this tool is that I built it using a total of 3 (yes 3) ChatGPT-4 prompts!

Here's how my first draft prompt looked 👀

PS. Once it's given you the code, the easiest thing to do is paste it into a free online editor such as JsFiddle to give it a sense check. pic.twitter.com/SThuI2xZox

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023

Want to give it a try?

Check it out here:https://t.co/NwaIj92uO2

Known limitations:

- No error handing
- Super Alpha MVP
- API rate limited to 100 queries per 5 mins (each year is a query)
- Code definitely isn't optimal
- Requesting a higher number of years is slow

— Sacha Fournier (@sacha_vyzz) March 20, 2023