New Features at Smashwords!
By Mark Coker, Smashwords
At Smashwords, we never stop innovating new features and capabilities designed to help you reach more readers.
Here’s a partial summary of some of the recent enhancements we’ve made since we last Smashwords Author/Publisher Alert in March:
Learn who “favorited” you
For the last ten years, whenever a reader favorited you on your author profile page, it created a link on their personal profile page that promotes you as one of their favorite authors. In the last week few days we added a fun new tool where you can now view a full summary of all the readers who have favorited you, along with their social media links. (You’ll can find links to it on both your own profile page, and in your Dashboard)
Coupon Manager enhancements
Your Dashboard’s Coupon Manager has been reorganized to make it easier to view active and expired coupons, and you can also now sort them by: regular price, after-coupon price, book publication date, category, code, campaign description, coupon creation date, expiration date, and, for metered coupons, the number of remaining redemptions.
Stay tuned for more enhancements to our popular Coupon Manager!
Audiobook hyperlinks
If your book is also available as an audiobook, you may now link to one or more places where it can be purchased. (In case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve been able to do the print editions of your ebooks, all along!)
You can find the audiobook and in-print link managers under the “Settings” pages for your books, via your Dashboard.
(And don’t forget, we recently partnered with Findaway Voices to help you get started producing audiobooks!)
Improved payment summary
Our convenient summary of all of our prior payments to you, accessible from your Account page, now shows you more details about where each payment went.
Global Pricing Control
We’ve had several authors who set special global pricing and then later forgot! The Dashboard and retail pricing pages have been updated so that when you have any active price locks set, the Global Pricing Control button will turn green.
Series Manager update
If you write books in series, our Series Manager is your best friend. Connecting books together improves their discoverability in both the Smashwords Store, and at all our retail partners. For authors and publishers who manage many, many series, you can now sort the list of series, to help you quickly find the one you’re looking for.
Improved series merchandising at checkout
Every time a customer of the Smashwords Store prepares to purchase the items in their shopping cart or redeem coupons, we recommend other books that you’ve written. If the book they’re buying is in a series, any books from that same series are now highlighted separately.
Special Deals updates
“Special Deals” is our automated merchandising program within the Smashwords Store, where we highlight books that authors have put “on sale”.
We’ve made two recent enhancements to Special Deals: – Customers browsing Special Deals now have access to a new filtering option: “Expiring Soon” — a great way to find deals to jump on, before it’s too late. – We’ve also enhanced the visibility of books that are enrolled in Special Deals across the store.
To enroll your book in Special Deals, simply visit your Coupon Manager, create a coupon, and then mark that coupon as “public.”
Improved control over communications preferences
We respect your inbox. We deliberately keep these “Smashwords Author/Publisher Alerts” infrequent. These alerts now come with one-click opt-outs at the bottom so it’s no longer necessary to sign into your account to opt out.
However, we recommend you NEVER opt out of these exclusive Author/Publisher Alerts, because otherwise you’ll miss out on alerts such as this one, and you’ll miss important notifications regarding new distribution outlets.