rss feed for authors' new books?
January 5, 2010 8:25 PM   Subscribe

I read a lot of serial genre fiction, specifically science fiction and fantasy. I'm currently reading a lot of series and some of them don't get new books very often. I sometimes completely miss new books. Is there some resource, preferably Google Reader compatible, that will allow me to just maintain a list of authors, and have it tell me when a new book is out? Amazon doesn't seem to have specific author/series searches. There was this question, but it's old, Amazon specific, for subjects not authors, and the answer no longer works. Assuming there's no such resource, would you use such a service?
posted by jefftang to Media & Arts (12 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Looks like this might do it.
posted by yerfatma at 9:13 PM on January 5, 2010


I think Amazon used to have such a feature, back when they were primarily a bookseller.

For authors published by HarperCollins, there's Authortracker.
posted by hattifattener at 10:03 PM on January 5, 2010


My friend and I discussed creating this service yesterday, but discovered that it already exists: eg;Robert Jordan (via)
posted by jacalata at 10:32 PM on January 5, 2010


It looks like you've gotten some good suggestions. I was going to add that I find Wikipedia to usually be pretty on top of new releases in certain genres...
posted by Slothrop at 4:59 AM on January 6, 2010


I follow tordotcom on Twitter - they tweet the releases every Tuesday, and Tor publishes a high percentage of the series I follow.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:06 AM on January 6, 2010


Response by poster: yerfatma: That looks good, but I tried it and was unable to actually find any items in any feeds for any author that I tried.

jacalata's site is a lot better, but the feeds have stuff that won't be published for 3 months, which makes it a little hard to manage as a way of keeping track of stuff to get now. Maybe I'll just use some long amazon wishlists...
posted by jefftang at 7:09 AM on January 6, 2010


My library has all kinds of RSS feeds; yours might, too.
posted by The corpse in the library at 7:21 AM on January 6, 2010


could you just set up a google alert on your favorite authors? you might get some news that isn't new-release-related, but...
posted by misanthropicsarah at 8:38 AM on January 6, 2010


Best answer: Author Alerts
posted by timepiece at 8:44 AM on January 6, 2010 [4 favorites]


Response by poster: Author Alerts is exactly what I was looking for. I can maintain all my authors in one place and it has separate feeds for upcoming and actual releases.
posted by jefftang at 9:08 AM on January 6, 2010


Glad I could help. It can give the occasional false positive (multiple author book where one has the desired first name and the other the last), but generally it works fairly well.

Why Amazon doesn't do this I'll never understand.
posted by timepiece at 9:20 AM on January 6, 2010


timepiece,
Thanks for posting the link. I have been using Trackle and I'm feed up with the multiple notices for the same book. Sorry for not adding any content to the OP.
posted by Ferrari328 at 2:20 PM on January 6, 2010


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