With a new book launch in my, very, very, near future I’ve started to wrestle with my marketing and promotion to-do list (my least favorite list). This time around I’m focusing on trying some new tools to get word out there. One option that has resurfaced is ARC Readers. I had done some research about them for my first book but at the time it felt like one other thing I couldn’t quite manage. So I decided not to use them. For my second book I’m back at the same to-do list item: ARC Readers? Do I want to use them?

An ARC Reader is an Advanced Review Copy Reader. Readers who receive free copies of your just-about-ready to publish novel before launch to provide reviews. It’s primarily a marketing / social proof tool so when purchasing readers come to your Amazon page (or wherever) they’ll see some, hopefully, positive reviews already out there. And to build hype before launch.

You can use them for pull quotes for marketing materials, but really it’s building that review count so those first few weeks / months your book doesn’t seem like it’s floating in space. It has some weight to it with the reviews. ARC readers can’t / shouldn’t be paid for reviews especially not for positive ones. You get what you get. There are services you pay for that provide tools to manage ARC readers and other promotional tools, but the ARC readers themselves are not paid.

Yes and no. The general idea is that they’re more useful for established authors, not new authors. Everything I’ve read it seems very 50/50 if they’re useful. But I also think that depends on the effort put into them. You could use a service that’ll manage that list and give you access to more reliable ARC Readers (but doesn’t mean they’ll all respond), or you can do it all yourself but that’s additional work to manage and follow up on. You could send out to 50 readers and only get reviews from 1. But again, I think that comes with your message, packing and effort, which all adds up in time.

So I didn’t use them for HOST. No regrets. I had a different plan and mostly let reviews naturally happen, but used a small amount of my budget to run ads. I think ARC readers are great for a short term boost around launch day, but after that, it won’t matter. And I’m not convinced they help in the long term. Given the effort, time spent, I’m not convinced the ROI is of value. Running a small ad built up a small community for me that will purchase the next book, and a portion of that group will review it. That’ll be over a stretch of time but I’m OK with that because I’m playing the long game in terms of building momentum. I don’t necessarily want a huge spike launch, I want a controlled one that I can long tail with targeted ads across multiple platforms. Having consistent sales month after month is more important (algorithm speaking) than a spike then a cliff to nothing. I feel ARC readers don’t fit into that model. But, this is an experiment and we’ll see. Of course, if you want to be an ARC reader for my next book, I won’t say no. Feel free to contact me.

In the latest episode of Writer Syndrome, we dive into ARC readers, how they work, services that help manage them, and how we both plan to use them or not. Check it out below (or on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts).