New Features for Authors on BetaBooks

I've added a few new features for authors this month. Here's the scoop:

First, a really small thing that should help save everyone some work, the email addresses in your invitations lists are now clickable, so you don’t have to copy/paste a reader’s email address to start sending them an email. It’s not a big change but it definitely speeds up the workflow for emailing your readers :)

Second, this week I’ve released two new features for our Pro Level authors:

(1) Reader Roles: 

You can now set a reader to be either a “Viewer” or “Collaborator.”

Viewers can read everything, including other people’s feedback, but cannot comment on anything or reply to comments. This is helpful if you work with an assistant, or you want to let someone else look at what you’re doing on BetaBooks without wanting them to give feedback.

Collaborators have the same permissions as the author, except that you can remove them from the book but they can’t remove you. This is helpful if you’re co-writing, or in some cases for we have authors who are sharing other people’s work with their reader list.

If you’re on the pro plan you can set the roles on the Book Invitations page. Just scroll down to where the readers are listed and you’ll see the box to switch role.

(2) Automated Reading Reminders:

This is one of the most requested pro-features. On the book settings page you’ll see a new box that lets you set a reminder interval for readers and a button to turn that feature on.

If you enable the feature, then your readers will get an email if they haven’t looked at your book in longer than the threshold you set.

As an example, if you say the reminder for 3 days, then a reader will get a reminder after three days without reading.

This is a pro-level feature, but there’s a benefit for all authors. Since we need to track when a reader last looked at each book in order to make this work, we’ve made that data visible to all authors. That’s right, even on the free plan! :)

To see it go to the track readers screen and scroll down. Underneath the normal “Tracking by Chapter and Version” display you’ll now see “Tracking By Reader” which shows you each reader, when they started, and when they last read.

This is a really basic V1 of this feature and I plan to come back and put a nicer design on this screen at some point soon, but since we now have the data available I wanted to go ahead and get this in everyone’s hands as soon as possible.

That’s it for today. Hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions please email me, I’d love to chat!

- Andrew