Author alerts on Amazon

I just sent this note to Seth Godin. It would be pretty cool if he is able to make this happen:

Seth,

It seems like you have close relationships with folks at Amazon, so perhaps you could raise this with them.

They are missing a very obvious feature which shouldn't cost them much to create and ought to help drive revenue and customer loyalty:

Add an "author alerts" function where I can opt in and select a set of authors such that I'm informed whenever any of them releases a new book.

(In my ideal world, there would also be an alert whenever any of them publishes a long-form piece in a magazine as well, which I could then purchase as a Kindle single. Magazines and authors get an extra source of revenue, everyone is happy.)

Sure, I could accomplish the same thing by individually signing up at each author's website.

Or I suppose I could follow the Twitter feeds of all of these authors. But there are a lot of people (including me) who don't want to follow an author's Twitter feed or blog. I read your blog daily, but that's about it.

This seems to be a no-brainer for Amazon. Let me opt in to be alerted by the next book written by Nassim Taleb, Louis De Bernieres, Daniel Pink, Daniel Kahneman, Alain de Botton, Seth Godin, etc.

They could do this easily during the checkout process, as either an opt-in or opt-out.

There is this website, that already does the service (just books, no alerts on articles): http://www.authoralerts.com/

But I don't want to have to go to a separate site - I want it integrated with the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem.

Here's to driving book sales,

Will