Advertising Your Book is a Necesssity ~ Part One: ARCs

I really hate marketing. It's not that I'm embarrassed to put my book out there in public, but the expense involved makes me cringe. 

And it's not as if advertising is guaranteed to work—it's that NOT advertising is a sure road to failure.

The rare times I visit Goodreads author groups, I see a lot of first-timers trying their best to entice buyers. They post their blurb, good or terrible, and hope someone will be lured into buying. Don't expect other authors to purchase your wares; they've got their own wares to sell. And on the rare chance that one person will plunk down their money, where exactly does that get you? 

No, free advertising isn't going to cut it. Social media is free advertising, too, but it's so swamped with "buy my book" posts, people scroll right on by. I had to learn that the hard way. An extremely rare subset of the population has the ability to capture attention on social media. I'm not part of that demo.

And don't think you can simply publish your book and readers will find it. I don't care how brilliant your metadata is or how your beautiful cover gleams. You may have nailed your blurb, to the envy of authors everywhere. Sorry; it doesn't matter. Sales drive sales. Sales give the algorithm a kick in the butt to get it to start showing your book. And not just sporadic sales, but steady, consistent sales. 

Experts will tell you that the real key to sales is your author newsletter. One problem with that: Where are your subscribers supposed to come from if you haven't sold any books? These experts operate under the premise that you've already got a thousand or five hundred or a zillion followers, and thus, boy, you can "sell them" on your next novel!

"But I only have one novel to sell!" 

"Oh—oopsie."

No, love it or loath it, an author needs to pay. 

It doesn't matter whether you're giving your book away for free just to get reviews, it's still going to cost you. The only exception to the rule is a KDP free book promotion. Sure, go ahead and give that a whirl. Why not? Some authors have found success with it. I hasten to add that only the authors who've reaped rewards from one bother posting about it. The rest of us are the silent majority. I'll do a free book promotion once or twice every 90 days, and my results are generally 3 free downloads. (Your mileage may vary.) I've sure never gotten a single review out of the deal.

(I'll admit that sometimes I just want to see some action on my report, so whether it's a free download or not, it beats seeing zero.)

The last time I did any advertising at all for my novel was on August 19. I did a stacked 99-cent push on three different sites. Here's my 30-day report:

 

See what happens when I do nothing?

But I don't have disposable income. The marketing I've done since my novel was published was done only when I felt I could spare a few bucks. There are authors who spend thousands each month on ads (really). To me, sixty dollars for a one-day promo is a lot. There are cheaper newsletter placements for sure. Bargain Booksy costs $30.00 for my genre. The Fussy Librarian only cost me $22.00. Still, those are one-day ads.

If I was to start over from scratch, I'd distribute ARCs to try to get reviews. I've solicited ARC readers for other books, but trying to find them for free is not easy. I landed maybe 5 or 6 from Goodreads ARC reader groups and none from Facebook groups. Everyone claims Facebook is great for this, but I joined scores of FB groups and didn't find one reader. I feel like the world's biggest loser. They could well work for your genre, though.

Here are some paid sites that will find ARC readers for you: 

Voracious Readers Only ~ After a long hiatus, VRO is back. If you are a first-time user, you can get 20 ARC readers for free. You can also get a free 30-day trial Evergreen membership (this is new). I've done both the free and paid options (with different books) and my 20 free readers were acquired in a snap. Almost immediately after being approved, I received twenty email notifications. With the paid program, I stopped counting after a while, but I gained over a thousand readers. 

The bad news: not one single review.

BookSirens ~  For $10.00 per ARC plus $2.00 per reader, this is an economical option. You can place a cap on the number of readers you want. 

The bad news: BookSirens doesn't accept every book submitted to them. I tried three times with three different books and was rejected every time. (They don't tell you why, but I did email them after the second rejection to ask what I was doing wrong, and the reply was, "nothing". Maybe the site becomes top-heavy with certain genres and it wants more of a variety.) Unfortunately, I'm unable to report on how many reviews result from a placement.

BookSprout ~  With the $9.00 "growing author" plan, you can get 25 ARC readers. I would definitely start with this cheapest plan. 

The bad news: Romance rules here. If you write in another genre, don't expect good results. I believe I landed six ARC readers from my campaign, and four of them wrote reviews.  

Hidden Gems ~ Disclaimer: I have not used this site. I went looking for its pricing, but it must be cleverly hidden, so I asked Google. Apparently, an author's cost is a $20.00 booking fee plus a per-reader fee of $3.00 after the first 20.

The bad news: Why hide your pricing? 

StoryOrigin ~ Again, I have not used. Its pricing tiers seem very convoluted. Thanks to Google, I found that for free an author can "host" their ARC on the site, but they must invite readers themselves. Otherwise, for $10.00 an author can get involved in swaps and cross-promotion. 

The bad news: This would be a no-go for me. First of all, if I could find my own readers, I'd just send them my book on my own and cut out the middle man. I want a site that finds readers for me. Also, I'm not into cross-promoting or any other group activity. You may feel differently. 

The sites listed above are the best known, but I'm sure there are others. 

One last note: The Storygraph giveaways. These can be purchased for both ARCs and published books. For $69.00 there is no limit to the number of readers who can enter, and you determine the number of copies you want to give away. The site will host your book for you, thus eliminating the need for you to email a copy to each winner. First, you will need to sign up for an account in order to be notified of the next giveaway period. (Don't worry; you won't have long to wait.)

The bad news:  Any reviews you receive are indexed by Google, but are deeply buried in search results. (I've never found one by searching Google.) And unless a reviewer chooses to cross-post to Amazon or Goodreads, reviews are limited to the Storygraph site itself. The not-so-bad news is that The Storygraph has a huge reader base, so unlike, say, BookSprout, your reviews will be seen by a large chunk of readers.

 

In theory, you want lots of reviews on publication date, which in addition to sales, may spark the algorithm to kick in.  

The last thing I want to do is discourage you, but if you're counting on a review windfall from distributing ARCs, you'll probably be disappointed. The fact is that many people sign up to receive advance reader copies simply to get free books, and the majority of those people don't even read them. Of those who do, few will take the time to write a review, even though at least some of the sites I listed will nudge readers to do so. Therefore, I would play on the law of averages: find as many ARC readers as you can in order to get that one of two per cent who hold up their end of the bargain.

Ideally, you want your book to get off to a good start; thus, ARCs can provide a kickoff. Before you begin placing ads, you need that social proof. If I ever clicked on an ad and found only one or two reviews, I'd be skeptical about buying the book. That's just human nature. 

Next step: Paid ads