AuthorPortal.com: Latest New Features
Written by Administrator Administrator on March 17th, 2015

MetaComet Systems recently released several new features on AuthorPortal.com.  

Our aim is to help publishers enhance their relationships with authors while operating their businesses as efficiently as possible.  To aid in that goal, our latest enhancements include:

• Ability to comment on documents:  In addition to publishers and authors being able to share documents, they can now comment on any existing documents.  For example, if an author has a suggested modification to a new contract, they can simply add a comment to that document and their publisher will automatically receive an email.  The publisher can then respond, prompting an email back to the author.  This process can continue indefinitely, providing an audit trail for changes along the way.
• Private Documents:  Both publishers and authors can upload private documents that only they can access.  This enables authors to use AuthorPortal.com as a repository for all of their publishing documents, such as drafts, mockups, etc, that may be related to their projects.  Publishers can also use it to share relevant documents with others in their organization.  Our customers use it to vet artwork, share epub files, etc.
• Author Questionnaire Enhancements:  Publisher can now set the order of questions in their questionnaires.  You can also have both "author level" questions, and "title level" questions.  This enables your authors to provide generic answers about themselves, and specific answers about each book that they have published.
• Suppress Emails:  Publishers and Authors often want to save documents to AuthorPortal.com, but don't need to notify the other party.  For example, if you set up a pre-existing author and have multiple contracts, manuscripts, and illustrations to upload, you may not want the author to receive an email for each one.  Similarly authors may upload documents to help them with their work which may not be relevant to the publisher at that time, such as supporting documentation or outlines.
• Project Owners:  Publishers can now specify project "owners".  These are the primary contacts associated with a project - typically an editor or a royalty administrator.

You will also find dozens of smaller improvements such as bug fixes and usability enhancements.

As always, please let us know what you think!