You might see tons of blogs or users talking about how they got the newest ARC for an unreleased book, and wonder, how might I be able to do this? Well, with some luck and patience, it’s actually quite simple. ARCs, or advanced reader copies are unreleased books that the publishers give out in return for a review. Now, getting paper ARCs are much harder than digital ones, so I’ll review how to get digital ARCs from a site called Netgalley.
Netgalley is a site where a bunch of different unreleased or recently released titles are put up for readers to request. There are a ton of different genres of books, so you can almost always find something you want to read. Before we review the best ways to get publishers to accept your requests for these ARCs, you have to make an account. I’ll make the assumption that we all know how to make an account, so I’ll leave you with a link to Netgalley so you too can create your very own account.
Now that you’ve hopefully made your own account, we need to go over a few features that are important to your overall success. I’m going to be going over what you need to succeed for those of you in the “reviewers/bloggers” category. One of the most important things to have on Netgalley is a good bio. Since publishers are giving you free digital ARCs, they want to know a bit about you. When I refer to them wanting to know about you, you shouldn’t go on about your daily life, but you should give information on, for example, where you write your reviews. Additionally, if you have any statistics, you should include those as well. If you have a social media (like for example, our Instagram is @universewithinpages), you should connect those to your Netgalley account as well.
Once you finish your bio, you should now focus on requesting books and keeping up a good feedback ratio. Your feedback ratio is the amount of times you successfully wrote a review on a book divided by the total books you got accepted for. In simpler terms, just remember to write a review after every book you get accepted for.
When you’re finding titles to request, there are a bunch of different genres you can choose from. I personally shoot for the Teens & YA genre, as that’s what I’m most interested in, but you can choose anything you desire. There are multiple different sortings of the books, and I personally like to choose from the “most requested” category, as it shows that it might be popular (as other people are interested in requesting the book as well). After you request a few books, it’s all up to patience and luck to determine if you’ve received it or not. If you have, congrats on your new book! You just need to send the book over to your device to be able to read it. If not, there are a bunch of different opportunities to become accepted, and remember that different publishers might be looking for different types of people.
Good luck on your new requests!