Many of the top indie authors on the Smashwords self-publishing platform make a lot of money by selling their e-books on as many digital stores as possible. In order to get more people using their own website to peddle books, Smashwords just released a new feature called Alerts. Whenever an author releases a new title or puts it up for pre-order you can receive an email.
Users have the option to setup the frequency of alerts from daily, weekly, and monthly. Smashwords is also considering adding “instant” notifications which push out updates within a few minutes.
Smashwords currently has over 450,000 self-published title in their digital bookstore. The company has a relationship to get these e-books into libraries via Overdrive. They also submit the e-books to many of the top bookstores such as Amazon, Kobo Google and iBooks.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
