Every day is a new day for authors and particularly new ones like myself who are learning different ways to make a book exposed out to the world. My first mistake was failure to market the book before publishing and I never gave out books for Advanced Readers Copy either for reviews. Well, I have never heard of ARC before coming to the publishing world and here I am finding out how it works.
After collecting so many views from the internet, one of the recommendations I have found is giving your book for free so that people could read them and provide honest reviews. This process also enables authors to rectify their books and make adjustments before the book goes on sales. The reviews also contribute to selling the book however one should not pay for the reviews since this is corruption and Amazon cracks down hard on dishonest people. I would not even be tempted to pay for the reviews, since cheating never pays.
I am a believer in hard work but this giving books for free does not sit well with me since there is nothing for free in this world. However, in the publishing world, there is no other way one can be identified in their writing apart from giving freebies. Therefore, my journey on providing freebies of my book commenced and this is how I am fairing on.
There are quite a few websites that facilitate ARCs and this includes Booksprout, StoryOrigin, Goodreads and BookFunnel among others. I registered with Booksprout, StoryOrigin and Goodreads.
Booksprout
My non-fiction book was published in the first week of August. In September I became a member of Booksprout and enrolled in their free ARC. Booksprout claims to have quite a few followers and therefore they promise to get your book exposed. I had a link which I used to let people know that my book was free on Booksprout and I got three claims at the time. However, I never got any review from the people who claimed my book.
I decided to give it another go however, Booksprout only allows one free arc and the author has to pay for the next arc on the same book. I have committed to it by paying USD 10 to give my book for free and get exposure. The ten dollars are paid monthly which I started on 3rd November 2020.
I am not intending to pay ten dollars a month, I want to see how many people will claim the book within this month then pull out on the deal. I have shared my link with social media and so far, four days into the deal nobody has claimed my book. I am giving 50 copies to be downloaded and only time will tell.
Goodreads
There is a lot of talk on joining Goodreads and how well this site works to encourage Indie authors to get exposed to their work. I joined Goodreads in late August. The site is not user friendly and it is like a maze trying to figure out how it works. I thought I had a problem with the site but later a few authors were complaining of the same. Once I registered with Goodreads, I disappeared since I got lost with the whole setup. I later revisited the site in September to try and claim my author page. I finally managed to set up my profile and had to wait for two days for the administrator to give the green light. Once up and running the next thing was to put up my book for exposure, at the time unless you paid $119 one could not give freebies.
I did not see the value of putting my money into their system therefore I just left my book there. I checked the site before writing this piece and now Goodreads states that only Americans and Canadians can give away freebies and all other countries are locked out. I cannot still figure out how this Goodreads site works. I understand that Goodreads is part of Amazon however even though you get reviews on this site, those reviews cannot be crossed over to the Amazon site. The exposure and the link to the Amazon sales book site is an advantage in this case.
StoryOrigin
I joined StoryOrigin in late September and it seems to be a newer website service. The site is not straight forward but setting up the author’s page is easy. There is also a place where one can provide freebies without paying a penny. As the owner says, the site is free until he decides on how much he will start charging people.
I did put my book for an exchange with other authors interested in reading books in the same genre. So far, I have done one exchange. The site is still young and growing and does not have a lot of traffic on it. I have also put my book for free from the start of this month and hopefully, people will download the book.
Bookfunnel
I have not registered with BookFunnel site and after researching, I understand that it is a book hosting site. It enables an author to store their book and facilitate freebies to be downloaded easily.
The site does not undertake any promotions for your book, therefore even though you register with them you have to do marketing for people to visit the site and download the freebies. Again, there is no free provision on this site, the cheapest an author can get is a $20 a year subscription which gives you nothing much apart from having a platform to download free books.
In conclusion
After dealing with all these sites and services, non is built towards developing new indie authors. The platforms are there to achieve their objectives in driving more traffic to their sites while they also make money. They have created links for authors to give free books and that is it. Please do not get me wrong the links are great in sending eBooks.
I do not mind paying and putting a lot of my effort into services if I am provided with a report of where these online services have exposed my promos even though it does not generate a lot of response. However, I feel short-changed when I volunteer to pay $10 per month without knowing what that money has done.
I might be wrong on this one but this indie publishing is a hard and long road. Any other views are welcome. Since I enjoy writing and I do not give up easily, I am working on my second book managing money. I am still learning.