Now that my second novel was done, I figured it was time to promote it. I had not done any promotion for my first novel, “Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog”, when I wrote it 20 years ago. I published it, mentioned it on Facebook once or twice and that was it. But I figured this time that I’d do it right. How hard could it be, right?

Wrong 😛 Turns out that there are a lot of services which help you (or claim to help you) promote your book. And a lot of them want your money. So there’s a lot to look out for and a lot to explore. And I spent most of my weekend doing just that. So, in case this helps somebody else, I thought I’d write all about my journey into the land of book promotion.

Originally, I thought I’d write about all the different services that I’d looked at. But then I realized that it would be a really, really long blog post were I to do that. So, I’m going to limit this to just ARC review services since I’ve gone through at least 4 – 5 of them and have something to say about each 🙂

In case you’re wondering what an ARC is, it’s an Advanced Reader Copy. A copy of your book sent directly to readers and possible reviewers before the book is published, or in some cases, soon after the book is published. I remember my friend Simon Haynes posting us actual printed copies of his first few novels all the way from Australia to Sri Lanka almost 20 years ago. I think that was our first experience with an ARC and it was a magical experience for us to receive a copy of a book even before it was published 🙂

But on to the actual services and the meat of this post!

SFF Insiders

I heard about SFF Insiders via a post in Reddit when looking for ways to promote my book. Somebody mentioned that it was a place where you can find a lot of bloggers and other social media personalities who review books.

While the website has some content, the biggest part their presence is on Discord. So you’ll need to use the join Discord link to join their Discord to participate.

I joined. It is fun place with lots of people who love books and a lot of activity. If you have an Amazon or Good Reads author page, you can authenticate your account as an author and then you get access to their library section where you can post your book and promote it. And ask for ARC readers. I have yet to find any reviewers there but my guess is that my genre might have something to do with it. (This will be a recurring topic in this post 😛)

All the people were friendly and welcoming 🙂 Some even gave me pointers on what I should do to promote my book elsewhere. One of these pointers was using a NetGalley co-op.

NetGalley

NetGalley in case you haven’t heard of them, I hadn’t (or maybe I had, but had forgotten), is a service for distributing ARCs to readers/reviewers. They have been around for a while and they do have a lot of industry professionals and reviewers amongst their users.

A caveat here about some of what I will say — I read posts about NetGalley from as far back as 2015 and as recent as a few months ago. Since NetGalley does not provide pricing information that’s easily found, some of what I mention here in terms of pricing might be outdated, or subject to change. So take it with a large grain of salt 🙂

NetGalley allows users to list their ARC on their server and readers interested in reading and/or reviewing their book can apply. The author has control over who (and how many) readers they want. As far as I understand it, you get some information about the readers such as their preferences, and an idea of their average rating and you can decide who will get to read your book.

One thing that I read over and over about NetGalley is that their reviewers can be brutal 🙂 Some people recommended not going with the at all if you didn’t have a thick skin. It also sounds as if NetGalley readers are incentivized to keep reading/reviewing in order to retain their access to review copies and so some of them might not read what the book is about, or even realize that it is an indie author, and come in with their own expectations and then leave 1-star reviews since their expectations were not met. I don’t know how prevalent this is, but this is the impression I got from my research.

Somebody mentioned in a blog post about contacting NetGalley and thinking they were a publisher, NetGally mentioned that their fee was $300+ per month. Once they realized that the person was an author with a single book and not a publishing house with multiple ARCs per month, they learnt that they could get a NetGalley subscription for around $500 for six months.

That’s still an eye watering amount for most people 🙂 So that probably isn’t an option for a lot of indie authors. But then there are NetGalley co-ops.

NetGalley Co-op

What’s a NetGalley co-op, you ask?

NetGalley allows for (I think) 20 authors to group together and form a co-op where the 20 authors get 6 months of NetGalley service for $300 per author. Or at least, that’s one version I read. I believe some people set up a co-op and break the 6 month period down into monthly chunks, since that’s what most authors probably want for a single book, and sell it at a lower fee like $50 or something.

I’ve seen co-op prices mentioned ranging from $25 to $75. Do note that there are other fees which could come in too should you want to use some of the other services provided by NetGalley.

Some co-ops apparently do all the work for you. They will upload your book, and when people apply to be reviewers, they’ll vet them or approve them for you. I really didn’t want this. I wanted to be able to approve the prospective readers myself.

The co-op that I looked at where this is possible is the Victory NetGalley Co-op. Anne has been running the co-op for a long time and her co-op was mentioned by several other blogs I read or by other co-ops which are no longer running.

This particular co-op charges $55 (plus 5% if you are not in the US or pay by credit card) and I began the process of signing up with them. It was straightforward and automated. You provide some info, you get an email with further instructions and forms to fill. They go over your info and then send you an invoice and once you pay your invoice, you get your spot in the co-op.

I didn’t complete the process 🙂 I was waiting for the invoice (and it probably wouldn’t have happened till today since it was the weekend) but I found other options and after weighing my own needs a bit more, I decided to keep looking since the co-op was $50 a month for one book. I have another book I hope to have out within a couple of months (I’ve done the writing, just need to edit it) and so I thought it might be better to look for a service where I can have the same features for about the same price but with slightly longer time-frame might be better for me.

A little bit of Googling got me a few other services. The first I tried was BookSirens.

BookSirens

A lot of people had good things to say about BookSirens. And I am certain all of that was true. But unfortunately, my experience with them has been less than stellar. I’m not sure if this was just my particular genre (there it is again) or something else. But I’ll present the facts (as I saw them from my side) here.

BookSirens is similar to how NetGalley works based on what I’ve read but most people mention that they are more indie author focused while NetGalley, at least in the opinions of some, is more traditional publishing focused.

I was just browsing their site when a popup, well, popped up 🙂 It said I could get a 3-month free trial of the service. So I was like, “Why not?” and entered my email.

I get an email asking me to click the link to confirm my application for the free trial but the email also mentions that spots are limited and depend on genre and other factors. I was confused since all I’d entered was my email. So how are they going to determine the genre of my book?

I clicked on the link and it seemed to basically create an account for me on the server and that was it. No other information as to what was happening or what I was supposed to do.

Since I had no idea how they were going to determine my genre, I thought maybe they needed me to upload my book. So I started setting up my book for review. I did realize that I wasn’t in the free-trial at this point though (they did mention that they’d get back to me in 1-2 days) since when setting up the book I was told that if I wanted reviewers found automatically, I’d have to go for the paid service. I opted not to. They also have the option where you can find your own reviewers and that’s free. So I opted for that.

I got another email after I set up the book. This said that they were processing my book and that if I wanted to consider their promoted service (which is paid) that I should contact them immediately. They said that if they decide to accept my book (the emphasis mine) they will contact me about next steps. They also mentioned again that due to space limitations and other factors they can’t accept all books.

I was getting slightly weird vibes at this point since it seemed as if upselling was the main focus here. And I still wasn’t sure what was happening with the free-trial. So I contacted them and asked them if I was supposed to submit a book now (so that they can determine genre) or if I should wait for the free-trial decision.

I heard back from somebody who I thought might be a support person at the time, but who apparently was the guy behind the service as I learnt later in doing some Googling. He said something along the lines of “If you don’t hear back from us within 1-2 days that means that you were not selected for the free-trial. Spots are limited.”

Well, great. So you weren’t really going to let me know and just let me guess? Also, I go back and check on my book submission after I receive the email and it was declined. But I did not receive any notification. I had to find out about it myself.

I’m a software developer. This kind of behaviour reeks of really bad software. It’s all about communicating what the business wants and isn’t really taking the user into consideration at all except as a product, or a market. I didn’t like it.

I asked some more questions about why my book was declined but I was simply sent FAQ links and was told that they can’t tell me the specific reasons. Given this guy runs the site and he probably declined the book himself, of course, he could have told me 🙂 He just chose not to.

I asked about refund policies. Again sent a link. I’d already read that. But what I was asking him was that since I couldn’t use their free service (my book was declined) and I had no idea how their service worked, was I going to get my money back if I signed up for the paid service and didn’t like how it worked? Apparently, if I signed up for the service I wanted (which was for authors who could promote multiple books) I wouldn’t get my money back at all. This was as per the link, the guy wouldn’t say so directly.

I decided to pass on BookSirens since it seemed to be all about getting people in and then getting them to pay. They also do this whole “scarcity” thing. They mention that storage, slots whatever are limited but not why. Most other similar services don’t do that. So why is BookSirens so limited in resources? I don’t know.

It’s possible that they focus on a particular market segment. I did read that if you do romance or urban fantasy, readers will line up around the block to read your book on review services 🙂 Again, this is just what I read. I don’t know if it’s true or not but my book’s not in those genres. So maybe they didn’t want it?

But on to BookSprout…

BookSprout

BookSprout and BookSirens had been mentioned several times in the same place when I was doing my research. So I took a look at them next. Also, the guy behind BookSprout was answering questions posted by users on Reddit and that looked like a good sign. If they want to engage with users and listen to feedback, that’s generally a company that I like to deal with 🙂

The sign up for the site was easy. They also allow you to have a free account and switch to paid for a month or two as needed when you need to promote your book. So that seemed like a much more user-friendly option.

I had my book set up within minutes. I think, if I recall correctly, they pulled most of the book info once I provided a link. But I might be wrong since I’ve been looking at so many of these, that I might be mixing them up 🙂

Unlike BookSirens, there was no review process. The guy at BookSirens, did have one parting dig — or at least, it felt like a dig — he said, we can recommend other sites which take any book, if you want. Again, the emphasis is mine. But the way it was said, it sounded as if he was saying that BookSirens is exclusive and will not allow anybody in off the streets 😀

Anyway, once set up, if you want reviews through BookSprout, you have to go for a paid service. Their charges range from $9 a month to $29 a month. I thought the charges were reasonable but since I didn’t know what the service entailed, I went for the $9 a month plan. Oh yes, they also have a 30-day money back guarantee.

Once I subscribed, I had to enter some more information for the reviewers, like a note with extra info, the book files themselves, whether the readers need to have read previous books in the series, and some other information. One thing to note here is that you’ll find that some options cannot be changed if you are on a lower-paid plan 🙂

Overall, it was easy to set up and very quick. I’m still waiting for reviews but it was a weekend, it’s been only about 12 hours, and there’s also that pesky genre issue 😛 If interested, you can check out my review campaign.

The only other thing I should probably mention is that sometimes BookSprout feels a bit slow. Sometimes, even though you have set up a book or a review, they might not appear on the relevant screen for a good 20 – 30 seconds. Other than that, I have no complaints so far.

Pubby

Pubby was the last service I tried in a really busy weekend 🙂 For some reason, the site looked simpler and somehow different to the other services. They weren’t really clear about how it worked since they mentioned “snaps” as the way to give (and get) reviews. But I decided to try them out.

You can sign up for free and on sign up I got 1,500 snaps — their in-site currency. Then as I went through stuff, I realized how it worked. You have to pay a certain number of snaps (depending on the type of review) to get a single review.

So, you need snaps in order to get reviews. But how do you get snaps? Why, you review other people’s books, of course 🙂 Or, you can opt to go for their paid pro subscription which gives you 20,000 snaps every month. The subscription costs $20 a month and given that most reviews cost about 1000 reviews (or actually slightly more, more like 1,100) you will get about 20 reviews a month with a paid subscription.

The way things are worded and how they work, it felt as if Pubby was aimed at people getting not just reviews, but also possibly sales on Amazon or page reads in one of the Kindle programs like Kindle Unlimited. But it also feels like Pubby isn’t as popular as the other ones I looked at. There are fewer books (at least on a quick run through) but they did seem to have a wider range of subjects and also be in multiple languages.

I was able to only afford one reviewer with Pubby (unless I read some books myself) and it turns out that I don’t get to approve reviewers. Whoever who picks the book first is it. I’ve already got a reviewer reading my book but since they have like four days to finish the book, I won’t know for a while what the verdict is from the reviewer 🙂

GoodReads

I had read about the GoodReads author giveaways sometime back and I did go back and look it up yesterday, but I decided that it wasn’t for me. But I thought I should mention that here too for the sake of completion 🙂

The GoodReads giveaways are paid campaigns where you can give away a certain number of copies of your book. It is positioned more as a promotion tool and not a review generator/source like the services I mentioned above, but given that GoodReads is all about reviews, maybe a lot of the people who read the books will at least some sort of review for the book on GoodReads? Also, GoodReads will sent review reminders to the winners of the giveaway about reviewing the book. But I don’t believe there is any incentive for the winners to actually review. But I might be wrong.

There are two versions of the giveaway — one for $119 per book and the other for $599 a book. Both a little too expensive for what you get, at least for me. The $119 is probably the only one I might have considered but for $119 all you get is the giveaway being featured in your friends’ news feeds for their visitors and an email sent to your (the author’s) followers and readers who have marked the book as one they want to read. If you have a large number of followers, that might be fine, but otherwise, it probably will not reach a lot of people is my feeling.

There you have it. That’s my round up of ARC review services that I looked at over the weekend. If you have any others that you want to recommend or talk about, please let me know in the comments. If I have enough, I’ll do another post about those.

I’ll keep on writing about other aspects of book promotion as I continue on this journey. So stay tuned 🙂