Publisher’s recommend NetGalley
by M Carroll
There are a slew of websites that will find reviewers for your book. They do this for a fee, but it is not the same as buying reviews for your book which violates Amazon’s review policy. Amazon has taken action against over 1000 sites on Fiverr that were selling incentivized reviews and fake review services. Real review services can find reviewers for your book legitimately. The most influential site is NetGalley.
What does NetGalley do?
NetGalley can be used both pre- and post-publication. Around 500,000 reviewers, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, educators, and media professionals worldwide use the site to discover new books, make buying decisions and leave feedback for publishers and authors.
Follow this link to an informational NetGalley video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE5OJ5LY67U
The benefits of using NetGalley
The biggest benefit of using NetGalley is the tremendous outreach to potential reviewers. They also widely distribute targeted newsletters throughout the year.
The Basic Netgalley package is a two month posting of one title. Then the organization of a press pack. These materials lead NetGalley members to authors.
When a blogger is interested, but aren’t able to schedule to review your book, there is still the opportunity that they will offer an interview. Additionally, they might be willing to take a press release from you and post that information for their readers.
The publisher or author can send a “widget” link to any of their contacts that pre-approves that person to view that title on NetGalley.
Some drawbacks to using NetGalley
You are able to auto-approve reviewers in bulk, which is easy and not time-consuming. There are many legitimate reviewers, some very high profile, on NetGalley. However, of the 120,000 or so people offering reviews there are some who will download free books and give them all low 1 star ratings. Therefore, it’s better to individually approve potential reviewers in order to select only real reviewers.
Negative reviews
Even with careful screening, be aware that reviewers are incentivized to leave a review regardless — even if they don’t like a book.
Because they are “ranked” and their ranking is affected by how many downloads they have as opposed to how many reviews they give, there may be negative reviews from reviewers who download your book before fully reading the description to see if the book fits their interests. And while you are able to, and are even encouraged to contact NetGalley reviewers, it may be best to ignore most negative reviewers and concentrate on the positive reviewers.
Two ways to join NetGalley
- Individual authors can upload their ebooks to NetGalley. As of January 2020, to add a book as an individual author the price was $450 for six months.
- OR Join a group of authors and share costs. Anamcara Press represents both our own authors, and offers to independent authors the option of joining a NetGalley author group. We set up and troubleshoot problems with NetGalley. Authors handle the file uploads and approve review requests. NetGalley runs webinars to train authors on using their software.
If you’re interested in joining Anamcara’s NetGalley author group, send us a message.
Keep scratchin’!
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” Pablo Picasso
