Hurra my novel is out - But is ARC reading dead?
My second novel, Never Fear the Worst, is out for a couple of days now. But something is trying to bury the works of independent self-publishing writers.
Robin
6/21/20261 min read
My newest novel, Never Fear the Worst, is just out for a couple of days. But I already fear the worst: ARC readers not reading or not leaving reviews. It's even extremely difficult to find ARC readers, and the usual platforms touting their services aren't well maintained and not really working.
So if you're a fellow writer, I can only discourage heartily you from spending budget on platforms taking your money for the faint promise of finding you ARC reader for the social proof your book will need to sell.
My journey with ARC reader platforms included a rejection by Book Sirens for unknown reasons, a paid campaign with booksprout resulting in exactly zero readers and an absurd offer by NetGalley. They priced their service so high I didn't even start to think about it.
I also tried to reach out to bloggers directly, but then you run in the Christian readers community who refuse books for profanity (wonder what kind of fiction they would ever read) or serious bloggers who are simply overwhelmed by requests.
Eat your own dogfood? So I did. I took up a ARC copy on booksprout. A thriller by a rather unknown self-publishing author. It turned out not to be a bad reading, I found a few typos, single thoughts leading nowhere. But it was a fluent story, keeping the pace up and in the end, a nice experience. I wanted to leave a fair review as I would expect myself. But after writing the review on booksprout I should have let the review on Amazon also. But there was first the issue of a wrong link on the booksprout website, so no book was found on Amazon, and when I searched for myself I found the book but Amazon won't let me leave the review.
So, folks. ARC reading seems to be broken... not only for me.
Anyway, Enjoy Life and Keep reading.