Quote:
Originally Posted by nikkie
This is a great idea. I cleared it with my boss and we should be able to add that.
|
Great!
Quote:
|
As a note, it seems like some of what you're trying to do with search might be accomplished using the Author Alerts feature for authors that we have on our site.
|
Ah, but that pre-supposes you know the author is on Smashwords in the first place! It's finding the author in the first place that's the issue. Besides, I limit personal emails from websites; I have to deal with enough emails at work that I reserve personal emails for friends and relations. Also, Google tends to consider such messages spam and every so often I have to go into my spam folder and un-spam the messages (and I dislike wading through sewers).
I think the problem with tags/genres is that if it's a free choice, the temptation is to put a tag/genre even if there's only a very minor element involved in the book. Unfortunately, I think the only way to deal with that is to have a list of genres with associated sub-genres and common tags, and only permit authors to pick 1 or 2 genres, and 1 or 2 sub-genres per genre, and then a limited number of tags from a list of standard tags associated with that genre/sub-genre combination.
Too often I'm looking through book descriptions associated with a genre filter, and wondering why it's been added to that genre. Unfortunately, doing that does not make me want to touch that author even with a barge-pole. It seems to be authors of romance novels that do that; and frankly I never much liked romance novels even when I was a teenager; I preferred boys fiction. (Fortunately our library didn't have any issue with what I read - the librarian might check with my mother if she thought the book was on the smutty side for a teenager in the 70s.)
Another possibility would be the ability to exclude books by genre when searching. This might be helpful to narrow things down; so if I want fantasy, I can say don't include books that are also in the romance genre or don't include the LitRPG sub-genre/tag.