Now that my second novel, “Sir Lanka Files” is finally out, I can sit back and reflect on things a little bit in terms of the release and all the events surrounding it.

One of the things I spent some time on before the release of the book was trying to find a good ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) service to read my book and provide an honest review. If you’d read my blog post about Promoting Your Book, you’d find my initial impressions about some of the more popular ARC services out there.

But that was my initial impressions. I’ve tried out a few of them and have a bit more to add now. Hopefully, this will help somebody out there who’s doing the research for their own novel. Or, even help people who want to find a place to get good books to read/review? I don’t know. But I sure hope this helps somebody 🙂

BookSirens

As I explained in the previous article, my initial impression of BookSirens was bad. The owner of the site did not appear to be interested in letting me try out their trial service even though they themselves advertise the trial service on the site and showed me pop up ads for it.

However, another aspiring author that I met told me that they had no trouble getting over 30 readers on BookSiren for their genre. Do note that genre always plays an important part in finding readers since I haven’t had a lot of success finding review readers anywhere but some people do seem to have no issues finding readers. So if you are looking at one of these services, consider your genre and do some research first.

Pubby

Pubby has a token system. You have to pay with tokens to get reviews and you earn tokens by reviewing other people’s books. I got enough tokens on sign up to pay for one review. I did that and wanted to see the quality of the reviews before I did anything else there.

Somebody grabbed my book for review almost immediately, but it’s been over two weeks now and no review 🙂 So I’m still waiting to see the quality of their reviews or if even indeed any review will appear.

BookSprout

After my issues with BookSirens, I was the most hopeful about BookSprout. But unfortunately, time and testing have proven (at least to me) that BookSprout is not reliable and might even be plagued with scam/fake accounts which do not actually read your books.

I had seen a post on Reddit about how they got reviews from what appeared to be a fake accounts on BookSprout. The CEO of BookSprout participated and made at least one comment about how he will have his team look at things and how he could see no reason for anybody to create fake accounts to review books. I was re-assured by the fact that the CEO was taking this seriously. It appears that might have been the intended effect 😛

After I signed up with BookSprout and paid my money, I had no reviewers interested in my book at all for a couple of days. Then somebody claimed one of the review spots. I decided to take a look at their review history to see what sort of reviews they left. I was surprised to note that they had left 23 reviews in one day! Not just that, but all the reviews seemed to be based on one or two templates where they’d do something like slot in the book name, the author name, and genre into specific spots in the review.

That looked very much like the behaviour I had seen in the Reddit thread. So I looked up the CEO’s contact details and left him a message with screenshots and details about what I was seeing. No response.

So I contacted their support (and I had to hunt around to find the support email since it’s not evident at first glance) and told them of the issue. They said that they’d escalated the ticket to somebody to review the account. I still had not heard anything from their CEO.

That was almost two weeks ago. I had another reader claim another review copy and their review history looked much cleaner and I was hopeful maybe that first fake reader was a one off.

Over the next two weeks, I checked my BookSprout account regularly. No updates from either of the readers. The fake one seemed to have stopped leaving reviews and so I thought maybe BookSprout had taken action against them. There were no reviews either but given how many books are available, this was to be expected. A review reader might be swimming in books for all I knew 🙂

Yesterday I checked my reviewers again and the fake reader was back in action. They had left 49 (yes, 49!) reviews the previous day and had 23 reviews for yesterday.

It looked very much as if BookSprouts didn’t care about the fake readers and might even be complicit in them operating. That made sense. So if a book doesn’t get any reviewers organically, perhaps they have the fake readers swoop in? Or maybe most of their readers are fake? I don’t know … All I know is that the inaction by the company and the pause in activity for a while before the reader started their shenanigans again looked very suspicious to me.

I wrote to BookSprout, told them that this behaviour looked very bad for them, and asked for a refund. They processed the refund but no explanations as to what might be going on. Again, that looks bad for them and their service.

So far, I’ve gotten a total of zero reviews from any of these services 🙂 I’m not unhappy since I’ve gotten my money back and have learnt something about each service that I can chalk up to experience. I hear from people that NetGalley co-ops work better but now, given all that I’ve seen, I have to wonder if it works the same for all genres or if some genres (like romance) perform way better than any other.

And if my genre does not perform well, how would I find out?

I guess more research is called for? 🙂

While I do my research, I hope my experiences do help somebody else avoid these pitfalls and find good review readers.

I have a bunch of other things I’d like to talk about, including getting covers for your book, I’ll have to do another (long) blog post some other time about that 😛