“Please review my book” are the most important four words when it comes to launching your book. But this is so much more than a simple request, especially when it comes to being strategic about it.

This week we’re going to tackle ARC teams—what they are, why they are useful, how you get people to join one, and what you do with them once you have them.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 048: How to Recruit, Manage and Mobilize your ARC Team

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 48 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here as always to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.

Crystal Hunt: This week, we’re going to tackle ARC teams. What are they? How do you get one? And what do you do with them once you have them? But first we’re going to do a little check-in and find out what have we been up to in this past week, since we were last gracing, your ear buds with our news. Michele, what’s new in your world?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: I’m super excited, Crystal. We are officially a couple of weeks away from the release of Muse of Avalon and one of the things that I’m doing, actually, in these days is preparing an ARC team. We are going to talk about that a lot today. I also finalize the book covers for the two fairytales that I wanted to use as a reader magnet for my Italian a newsletter. So I am very excited about that. That was the biggest project. Was focusing in the past couple of months, I would say. So hopefully if everything goes well by the second half of March, I should get those two bad boys out.

So hopefully to get a bit more newsletter subscribers on my Italian front. Let’s see how it goes. Never done something like that. Not even close. I’ve never attempted that something like this on the English front. It has required a lot of time for preparing and I am very looking forward to see what’s going to happen.

And also I have actually bought a few hours ago this bad boy here. Which is, you can’t see this but is a MacBook Pro and it’s the latest generation with the M1 chip. And it’s basically the, I would say the biggest single expenditure that I made probably in the past 10 years. I’m very excited and again, I came back from the Apple store three hours ago, four hours ago. I know that this guy is going to help me a lot in the 10 years, if everything goes well on my authorpreneur career. So I think it’s an investment. And even though it was that expensive, I am now recording this podcast with a MacBook Air that lasted for eight years.

I’m really hoping that his substitute is going to be as good as the computer that I’m using now, as the laptop and laptop that I’m using now. So very excited. And I just wanted to show you that live. So that MacBook Pro is going to help me forge hopefully a few dozens new books in in the coming years, in the coming decade.

And then the last thing that happened for me, Crystal, if you remember, I participated to that Kobo promotion for the months of February, that promotion expired, it was focused on the historical fiction. And if you remember, I enrolled a couple of books. Bringer of Fire and Soul of Stone.

And since it’s the first time, I dunno if it went well or not. I think I made after taxes and stuff like seven bucks, eight bucks. But it’s just two novellas and it’s a very first time I attempt something like that and it just cost me two clicks so I can get seven bucks for two clicks, I’ll take it. So I was excited about that and I actually enrolled for another couple of promotion again for Kobo and again for these two books. And I want to see if they accept me for this too, maybe I’m going to make another 5, 7 bucks? 10 bucks? Maybe? It’s a long way to repay this MacBook Pro, but it’s a beginning.

So just so you guys know I’ve been doing these things. I do know that Crystal week has been as exciting as mine. So take it from here, Crystal, what have you been doing?

Crystal Hunt: I have not been buying a new MacBook Pro, although it’s very tempting. I have to say it’s the spring cleaning.

Loads of people around me are buying new computers which is always very exciting as a writer. It’s a kind of our, besides our brain, it’s our single most used tool. And it’s really a prevalent piece of everything we do and having it work properly and not living in fear of having a hard drive crash and losing all of your stuff is really important.

What have I been up to? I have just been working with my assistant entering the last of the books so far that have been published into Plottr. Our series Bible is just about ready to roll, which is very exciting cause I’m getting ready to dive into the next book in the Rivers End romance series.

And that one I’ll be starting in two weeks, once I have wrapped up my current focus project, which is the non-fiction book, Strategic Indie Author, which is the next one in the Creative Academy for Writers Series. And that guide should be going live in April, which is very exciting. I’ve got a date with my editor booked, so I need to have it on her desk by March 15th.

So there you go. That’s the plan. And after that, I’ll get to finish the coauthor book, which is super exciting. So there you go. There’s two new guides on the horizon. Both will come out this spring and we cannot wait to unveil those upon the world.

But now our mission today is to talk about ARC teams.

What is an ARC team and why do you need one?

First what is ARC team and why do you need one? Both very important questions. I’ll start with the what and we’ll let Michele talk about the why in a second here. What is an ARC team? A R C stands for advanced reader copy. In my world, I call it an advanced review crew because it’s really reviews that you’re asking people for and what a review crew or an ARC team is a group of people who are willing to read your book in advance of its publication and then right at launch or during launch week to leave honest reviews on your book wherever you’re selling them so they could be posting on Amazon, they could be posting on Kobo or GooglePlay all of those places. So yeah, there you go. Basically, they are a team of people to help you launch your books with some reviews.

Now, why is that important to Michele? Why do we care so much about those reviews?

Michele Amitrani: So depending on what you’re doing, you might have to use this group of people in different ways. Some people also call them street team, if they know that they’re going to be also ambassadors. So there are some of these people that are really big fans and they want to sustain the author, so they might be doing other things which are not only leaving reviews, but for what concern the ARC team in it’s a full original meaning is they help you create in buzz around the new release. So it might be something that you start like a few weeks before, a few days before, or the day of the publication.

That again, depends completely on what you want to do with the release of your book. I think if you are an experienced author and you are publishing book number 17 is going to be different the way and the number of the people that you have on your street team, or as part of your ARC team. If you’re publishing the second book, it might be a bit different, but they do help you, in any case to create some buzz.

They also help you build the awareness for your product or whatever it is, a box set or if you’re doing a revamp of one of your series or straight out you’re publishing a brand new book, they can help you building your awareness for this new release.

And as Crystal was mentioning the most important thing that they will help you do is: gather some reviews, which is really the most important factor and the most important reason why you should have these people on board. Because it is this, the answer to the question of why.

The reason is because they help you build a nice product page. After your cover, which we assure and it’s super awesome and after creating a blurb, which a professional copywriter is going to envy, one of the most important factors in that product page is price and then reviews.

Now price is not something we are going to discuss today. But when me, myself I browse for buying books one of the factor that I check are the reviews, and one of the things that I see and that convince me to click that buy button is not only the quality of the reviews, but also the quantity of the reviews.

And I think Crystal said more than once that once you have like maybe 20, 25 reviews and then, that’s a nice number. That’s a actually a number you can see there are people that is not only your friends or your family, or, people that knows you that published some reviews is actually a lot of people read that stuff and it just makes for a more professional presentation.

So why do you need an ARC team is because you want to tend toward that double digit number, if possible. Now this should not mean that you have to do everything you can to get 20 to 25 review or more reviews in the first few days. I’ll tell you my story. I took a long time a few months actually to build 19 reviews for my leading product for mythological fantasy series Soul of Stone.

And I had to use not only an ARC team, but then I had to use a promotion with my newsletter, hire to ask on some forums, Facebook group, but if people were interested in reviewing that stuff, it is not easy and it’s usually not something, especially if you are not established at just the ARC team can do.

But I would just say, keep that in mind. It’s a longer game if you want to build up that review count. Crystal, do you  have anything else to add? I’ve gone over the ‘Why’ point, how do you go about it if you want to create one of these ARC teams?

How do you create an ARC team?

Crystal Hunt: Well, There’s a couple different ways of building an ARC team and there’s lots of places to find people in and inflows of traffic potentially for people who can join your team. But there’s two very different approaches to how you build an ARC team as well. So I think it’s important to talk a little bit about ongoing recruitment and a stable team that would work with you on all of your books versus a single book review team that might be set up just for a single book. So one way that authors will handle this is when they have a new book that’s ready to come out and they’re looking for an ARC team for that title, they’ll send out a message to their whole mailing list, maybe post on social media accounts that: ‘Hey, I’ve got a new book coming up, does anyone want to be on the ARC team for this particular book?’ Some people have you fill out a form or explain why you’d be a good candidate for being on their ARC team? Lots of people will limit how many spots there are on that team. So they might say, okay, there’s 200 spots, first 200 people who reply to this email, get to claim those spots.

Usually it’s a good practice to have at least four times as many people on your team as the amount of reviews that you want during your first week, because not everybody’s going to be able to read it and post on time. Not everybody can read and post on the same platforms. Yeah, it’s really good to have extra people more than you think.

If you’re doing really well, you might eventually get about 80% of your review crew to actually post reviews, but you can’t expect a hundred and you can’t expense expect it right away. And it’s really important to over plan in this particular area. The other reason it’s important to have more than you think you need is that some folks just maybe won’t feel like they could give the book four or five stars. Not everybody will love everything you do and especially if you’re doing ongoing recruitment, you need to give people an out, it’s like my grandma always used to say, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

And that’s how it works in the review world. You hope if they really don’t love it, they’ll explain to you what they didn’t like about it, so you can maybe think about if you’re going to do something different next time, but also you can, not push too hard on people if they’re not posting because they don’t want to post something negative, maybe let them. You don’t want them to have to post a less than awesome review. So if you are recruiting book by book, that’s a great strategy for people who may be released a book a year, or even a book, every three or four or five or six months, you maybe don’t want to have to maintain your review crew all through every month of the year if you’re only going to use them a couple of times a year. Now for those of us writing short stuff and releasing in normal times very frequently, it’s important to have people on call for that. You can still do book by book, but personally I found that was a lot of management and a lot of lists and groups and things to maintain in my mailing list.

And so instead I found it more beneficial to have ongoing recruitment for a stable review crew. And my group of reviewers gets the first crack at the review copies every time a new book comes out, they don’t have to do every book, but they get the first shot at doing them if they would like to. And so that’s one way to constantly recruiting people and constantly getting the people who are really genuinely interested, but you do have to maintain your relationship with those people as it goes on. So if we look at where do we find those people, let’s say, I’ve decided I want to do recruitment for a single book and I want to gather, let’s say I want a hundred people because I want those 25 reviews to hit in the first week on whatever Amazon channel and whatever wide channels that I want reviews on. Where are some good places to find people? Michele, where did you have luck with finding some of your arc readers?

Where do you look to find members for your ARC team?

Michele Amitrani: There are several places. I would say some of them are a bit more accessible than others, especially at the beginning. Others require a knowledge that maybe not all self publishers there are starting out can use. For example, let’s say they lower barrier of access, so it’s easier for any kind of people to use them.

Some others require a bit more work. If you’re starting out, you can definitely -and you have a Facebook page for example, or an Instagram account, although I don’t use Instagram a lot probably not a good place where to ask, but it depends on who’s following you. If you have a Facebook page and you’ll have already some dedicated people following you, you can ask.

So social media would be one venue. Of course you have to make a post that is enticing. So something like the book cover, maybe a mockup maybe the blurb and the description of the book might be something that gets some attention.

And your newsletter is the second way you can gather some interesting. Again, it depends a lot on the size of your newsletter, on the engagement. I can say now with my, I have now on the 1500 people, I can say that probably if I send the a newsletter, which is focused solidly on asking if people are interested in become one of my member of my review crew, probably something between 10, 12, maximum 15 are going to answer yes. That again might change it because your level of engagement might be higher or a bit lower. Plus you might have a newsletter which is awesome, meaning that every single one of the people that subscribe were, they were organic. So that means that they love you, they love your work. The majority of my newsletter is, has been built at least at this point with non organic traffic.

When I get those 12 or 15 people, I actually, I feel to be very lucky because that’s going to be the bedrock, the foundation of my review crew. So it’s way better than zero.

So newsletter might be a way for you to use and leverage that side of your following. If you have a website and you have a blog and you want to create one post that is dedicated only on your upcoming publication you can create some buzz around that.

You can even say: this is something that I’m writing. If there is somebody that is subscribed to your blog, they might be interested in becoming a part of your review crew, because if they’re reading your post frequently, that means that they’re interested in you, and that means they’re interested in your books, and that means they might be interested in lending you a hand on this regard. The other way you can do this, and this is something that I’ve been experiencing and trying in the past few weeks with some of my novellas is a website called BookSprout. The website is also a community, if you will, of people, there are actually going there to read the book as ARC. This is not something that is going to work for everybody. I don’t have anything other than experience from other authors that have been using this website.

But I do know that usually if you are writing romance, for example, you might have a higher chance to get people interested in your book, so they will download it via BookSprout and then they will review. Again I’ll give you my example, I have used books proud for Soul of Stone, which is a very shorter novella of mythological fantasy, and I got four people that requested a copy. So you see, it depends. Mythological fantasy is very, it’s a very niche genre. If you’re writing science fiction, maybe something very popular this moment might be some kind of urban fantasy, you might have way more than me. Plus if you have a book which is not a novella, usually that might be more interesting for a reader.

So BookSprout might be another venue and another one that you might want to use, and again, I’m recommending this because I’ve been using this also, it’s a website called BookSirens. This one though is something that you have to pay for. So it basically: they will showcase your book, following all the Amazon term of services guidelines, so you don’t have nothing to worry about, but you basically are paying a small fee so that your book is broadcasted on their platform and if people are interested from your description and your book\cover, they are going to click to that, and they’re going to decide if they’re going to download the book or not.

And it’s basically paid per download. I personally tried it and it worked very well for me. I’ve been using it for the same reason that I use BookSprout, to gathering some reviews for Soul of Stone. Mileage may vary. If you’re writing a different genre with a different length, it might be different for you. So, we always encourage you to do your own homework, but definitely if you’re interested in having a bit more chances of gathering these advanced review people, make sure to also check this BookSirens.

And Crystal, is there anything else you would suggest to our listeners regarding ARC team?

Maintaining an ARC crew

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, Hidden Gems is another one that does a similar thing to BookSirens. The biggest thing I would say is just a caution. You cannot pay for reviews on your books. That is an outright violation of Amazon’s terms of service.

You’re going to get spam as an author in your email of companies saying: ’Oh, we’ll get you a hundred reviews on Amazon or whatever.’ Do not do that. It is not in line with Amazon’s terms of service. So that’s really important to be aware of. They are not real reviews, they do not count what is okay is paying to access a database of readers who will volunteer to then read and post a review of your book on various sites. So it’s really important to understand the distinction. There’s a really great video that Dave Chesson from Kindlepreneur made, explaining how reviews are working and how it’s okay or not okay to solicit reviews.

So definitely before you are diving into maintaining your ARC crew, you should be watching that video, you should be understanding what you are and aren’t allowed to offer to your readers and understanding what the rules are. And I think for the other platforms, it’s important to know that you can’t just post reviews on Google Books and Apple Books, if you haven’t purchased from those platforms. On Amazon, you can post a review, even if you didn’t buy from there, but not so much for some of the others. So you have to be aware of that process. And as we move into talking about how do you keep your review crew organized? How do you keep your ARC team orderly and doing the steps you want them to do and the order you want to do them, it’s something to keep in mind is that the system is going to work differently if you are a wide author versus a KDP select author who has their books, only on Amazon. How do we organize that? Some people will have a spreadsheet that they maintain, where they take people’s names and email addresses and what platforms they review on, and then they keep track of it that way, and then they send out copies using BookFunnels certified mail function, where you can send a copy specifically to a person of your book, and then they will download, whatever format works for them and review it from there. So that is one way to handle it. I don’t actually keep a spreadsheet. I have 200 people on my ARC team and it’s a lot of management.

So I do it all by groups and tags in my email provider and I manage things that way. So I don’t actually have spreadsheets and lists of all the people. I just have them in a MailerLite or SendFox group, and then I moved them to various groups as they claim certain books. And actually a lot of it’s done automatically connecting BookFunnel with my mailing list I have it set up so that if somebody downloads a copy of a specific book through BookFunnel, it puts them into a specific group in my mailing list service so that I then have a group that says ARC team, Silver Bells, and I know that those people have downloaded the book and I need to follow up with them.

So then I can send out an email to that group of people saying: ‘Hey, just a reminder for anybody who hasn’t yet posted, now’s a great time to do that’. And so that makes it a little more easy to manage the communications part. Anyone can hit reply to that email and then we have a personal back and forth conversation, so they do have direct access, but you want to make sure that you’re not creating a monster, we’ll say, in terms of the work you have to do to maintain that.

So there’s a bunch of different steps to interacting with your review crew folks. And I’m going to walk you through a few of them, just so you have an idea of what it might look like when it comes time to launch a book.

So you’ve got your book. It’s ready to come out. You have set up your files on BookFunnel. So that means ideally if you’re using Vellum, because we love Vellum, if you’ve exported your files from in vellum, you’ll have a mobi ePub, which is the Kindle version, you’ll have a regular ePub, which is the wide version, you’ll have a PDF as well. So if you upload those things, plus your book cover into your BookFunnel account, you will be able to send out a link to any of your review crew folks who need to download the book.

One of the settings that I love is that people are only allowed to download a book, if they’re on a specific mailing list.

So if you have the integration turned on, I have it set up so that even if they shared that link with the friend who wasn’t on the review crew, the friend wouldn’t be allowed to download it because their email address that they had to put in to download wasn’t in there. So it’s a nice way of controlling access to things.

So your book is ready to come out. You’ve sent out copies to your viewers, ideally a couple of weeks before your book’s coming out. Timing can vary depending on how long your stories are and how often you’re releasing. So if you write short stuff and you release all the time, then maybe you only send it out a week beforehand because people can really, they can read the whole story in a couple of hours. they don’t need scads of time. If you are writing epic 120,000 historical fantasy stuff, then it’s going to take people a number of hours to read those books. You probably want to make sure you give them at least a couple of weeks so that they have time to actually read it before the book comes out.

So then you watch like a hawk until your book listing goes live, and then you send a message out to all of your ARC team that says: ‘Hey everybody, the book is live. Here’s a link of where you can go to review it.’ And you direct people to go and leave their reviews.

Now not everybody follows up right away. More people follow up right away. If you include a direct link to where they can post the reviews. So that’s an important thing to include. And once you’ve done that, you’re going to wait a couple of days and then you’re probably going to send out a reminder, at least one, sometimes two, over a period of a few days.

Now, one of my tricks to getting people to get a verified review on Amazon and also as a way of reminding them without sending the same reminder email multiple times, is I usually give a discount for the first couple of days when I launch a new book so that even though people on my ARC team got a free copy, if they’re reviewing on any of the sites really, if they’ve downloaded the book, they’ll have a verified review on Amazon. So that’s really important. If you’re wide, you’ll need to offer your review crew folks, the opportunity to get a download code through Google play or through Kobo or through Apple books so that they are able to actually download a copy through that platform, which then will unlock their ability to leave a review.

Otherwise they won’t be able to. Now some places are wide open, so BookBub right? You can post reviews on BookBub and you don’t need any special, anything. You just have to have an account there, which is free. You can post on GoodReads. You can post on Library Thing. All of these other places don’t require a purchase.

So even if you have people on your team who can’t post on one or the other of the sales platforms, it’s nice to get stuff posted on those other places, too. Now, if I were to send out an email that said: ‘Hey, the book’s live. Here’s 47 places for you to post’ it’s a bit much, you’re asking these people for a favor. You don’t want to overwhelm them or confuse them or make it hard for them to remember which places they did and which ones they didn’t. So I always do a couple of rounds of emails. The first round to go out is always about posting on the sales sites, because that makes the biggest difference for your launch stuff.

And the biggest difference for your advertising. The second email that goes out a few days later says: ‘Okay, great. Thank you so much for everybody who did post the reviews already. If you didn’t, make sure you do. And here’s some links and for all those who are ready for a new mission, our current mission is to post on Goodreads library thing, or BookBub whichever ones you are on.

And that it’s an opportunity just to remind people and switch it up a little bit. And for those keeners who are all over the place, a bunch of them will probably have done it already, if this is not your first book with this review crew, they tend to be pretty good about learning quickly, where things want to go.

And you’ll find lots of your ARC team volunteers are probably also on other authors ARC teams. So you’ll actually learn a fair bit from your readers, if you listen, when they reply to your emails and give you suggestions as well about how to handle that. Okay. So that sounds pretty straight forward, right?

It sounds a lot easier than it is to actually do, because getting people to sign up and getting people to post the things is definitely a numbers game, and it definitely takes some time to build. I think it was the fifth book inside of six months when I really started to see a great uptake on that.

If you aren’t frequently releasing, then I think doing a book by book recruitment, if you have a big mailing list is not a bad idea. And because I’ve been stagnant for quite some time, I haven’t released a new fiction book in, oh, it’s been almost two years actually! Then I’m going to have to reboot all of this in the next few months as I start, re-releasing all the new titles.

And if that’s the case, if you’ve been out of the swing of it for a while, you may need to treat your whole list as a potential ARC team and send out an invitation of who wants to do this next book with me? Then let’s do that.

Now the other bit we didn’t really talk about was you can actually have kind of a two-stage review crew process, which is a neat way to do this, which is you have your super tight team of VIP all-star, ultra super fans. And that’s your official ARC team, but once you’ve had your arc team go and post reviews, if you’re still not where you want to be, you can open it up to your whole mailing list. If you need to and say, okay, I have an opportunity for anybody who wants to get an advanced copy of this book or a complimentary copy of the books already out.

If you want a freebie, I’m willing to offer you one in the hopes that you will review it. You can’t say in exchange for review, because that would be breaking the terms of service, but you can say I’m willing to offer it up in the hope that you will post a review if you enjoy it. And that is that’s an alternate strategy, and then you get both stages of things and often the ones where you pay like BookSirens or HiddenGems, take a while to get set up.

And so if you’re on a waiting list for one of those, you might as well do the other things as you’re getting started.

So how do you maintain your mailing list? Michele?

Michele Amitrani: So you said it’s super interesting for me because of course I have a different experience since I’ve been really starting releasing stuff consistently in Italy and in the US and Canada, just over four months ago, I started on the last bit of November 2020.

So I would say four or five months ago. What I use after this moment is every single time I need to send a specific newsletter where I recruit people that might be potentially interested in reviewing my books on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

So I basically start from scratch every single time. But I did find that there are a few people that always answer and now Muse of Avalon, this is the third book, so I’m starting to familiarize with these people and I’m putting those names and emails in a specific part of my Notes. It’s an app on the Apple devices, so I’m using it. Sometimes the newsletter that I send it doesn’t reach everybody. And for some reason they might not read that specific email. So sometimes maybe a week or a couple of weeks after I sent the huge newsletter, I will send an email to the people that I think might be interested, then I offer them the possibility to read the one of my review copys in the hope that they will leave a review. And most of the time they answer back and they’re more than happy to read the book and review it.

So this is very important. Sometimes people don’t read the email. And I’m sure 100% percent of this, because it happened more than once that I was sure that my email was read by basically most of the people from my newsletter that were active, but it’s not always the case.

So I invite you to send, not the exact same email, but maybe a slightly different wording a week or after, or a couple of weeks after reminding yourself that not all the people are going to read your first email. So again, this has been my experience. And if you try this a couple of times instead of one you’re pretty assured to have a bit more people that are going to review your book.

So I started from scratch with my latest mythological fantasy, again, rephrase the newsletter, the fact that I was releasing a new book, if there were people interested, they could answer to that email and I got a bunch of new people and other people that already published a review for the previous two mythological fantasy. So every single time for me, usually it’s every 60 days I send the newsletter.

And I’m also at the same time building on this Excel spreadsheet the name of the people that are consistently asking to be part of my review team, because in the back of my mind, I have as a goal to create an ongoing team of review people. I think it’s going to take time, as Crystal said, it took her more than five months or five months or something.

No, six months you said, and five different products. So I’m at my third product. And I don’t think is going happen for me, if it’s going to happen before, I would say winter 2021, probably because by that time I will have a published the first three books, the box set and then the second first and second mythological novella of the second box set. So it will be five brand new products. At that point I hope to have some people, maybe 5, 10 that are really interested to my book, and then I don’t have to chase, but I’m planning to do the chasing for at least another a year or so.

These people, they have life one of the most important thing that I always keep in mind is that every single one of them are doing you a favor. So it’s not you that are doing them a favor, but I always see it as they’re dedicating some of their time to help you.

So I try to be as understandable as possible and to give them as much time as they need to review my books. So please keep that in mind, they are helping you out. So always thank them. Very important in every single email, at least that’s my mindset. What do you do with your ARC team Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, my ARC team is my crew. And I call them it’s my Rivers End review crew. And they are my people. So it’s very much a back and forth, super chill.

They get the real me behind the scenes, all the things. And we do just email back and forth and I’ve got to know some of them really well, and it’s a really fun kind of relationship. So I’m super informal. My romance brand is very much just me in terms of high authenticity, low formality, lots of access and chatting and whatever.

So I like to provide all kinds of fun behind the scenes stuff and extra bonus things and, sneak peeks into things and explanations of the story behind the story and pictures of inspirational stuff, whatever. So they get all kinds of bonus bits and they are with me long-term right? Because it isn’t just for one book when people sign up, I tell them it’s your seat for life until you want to give it up. So it’s yours until you don’t want it anymore. And so it does build an ongoing relationship. It’s not a one-off scenario. I do manage my crew in a very different way than a lot of people do in that I’m always recruiting. It’s not based around whether or not I have a book that’s coming out right now.

And I just tacked an email into the auto responder string that welcomes people onto my mailing list. So a couple of weeks after they get the last email in the string, it says: ‘Oh, Hey, are you the kind of reader who likes free books? Is that how you found me? And if it is, and you want some more free books my review crew gets unlimited access to all of the stories.’

So if they are interested in that, then they can click to sign up and they tell me a little bit in a reply email about who they are and why they want to join, and assuming they’re not a spam bot of some kind or someone who appears wanting to just steal the files, then they get to claim if there’s a spot on the crew and what happens is they actually get a welcome message at that point, that links them to a website page that I have, where all of my books are downloadable.

It’s the review crew home page. And they can click on any of my titles that they haven’t read yet or reviewed yet and download a free copy through BookFunnel, and then post on the older books as well, because it might be three months when somebody signs up to when the next book comes out and it’s an opportunity to get some reviews on older books as well, not just focusing on the new ones.

So that’s one way to manage that without having it be, because it would be really confusing if people were constantly asking for a new book or what about this one? Or can I try this one? It would be a lot to manage. So having a website page I can send them to and having my BookFunnel accounts set up so that only people on the review crew master lists are allowed to download those books, it keeps it safe and secure. And it’s actually a public page. Anybody could come to that page and see that it exists, but there’s a note at the top that says, you won’t be able to download anything from here unless you’re on the crew and this is how you join it. And so there’s a bit of a recruitment factor on the page itself as well.

The other advantage of having it be a website page is that, beside each book, I also have the review links. So if they have read it and they’re ready to post a review, they can click to take them right to the page where they can leave that review. And it just helps make it easy, keep everything in one place, and it’s a one link that I can always share back as well when I’m sending out a newsletter, it’s easy for me to grab. I’m not collecting things up from a whole bunch of places. So that it’s just, it’s a somewhat complicated system to build in that it takes a little bit of thinking about and a little bit of figuring, but once you have it going and it’s all automated, it’s a really fantastic way to manage it all without having to manage hands-on manage it all.

So I’m excited to get back into the swing of things with that. One last bit we didn’t talk about, but is an alternative approach to running an actual full-on ARC team. By far and away the book that I have the most reviews on it’s it was almost 500 last time I looked at it is the one that I have Permafree and that’s because anybody who wants to can download it, and, I think probably about. 400,000 or 500,000 people have downloaded that book now over the years. And it’s been reviewed a lot of times. And so that is an option. If you need to get a bunch of reviews on your book, you could make it free for a little while and then see if you can get some more reviews on it that way.

And then people will have downloaded through the platform, so they will be able to post the reviews. Some people think about that for a first in series, because it’s really important that your first in series have a very respectable amount of reviews if you’re going to drive ads to it, if you’re hoping to use that book to lure in new readers, you really need the social proof to show that other folks have read that book and really enjoyed it, and that the series is worth diving into.

So turning a book free is definitely a strategy that some people use and they leave it free and they’ll do a couple of big pushes, maybe through Freebooksy or one of the other promo sites to drive a whole bunch of people there. And then once they’ve got up to the number of reviews that they want, then they will shut that down and go back to being a paid product with a whole bunch more reviews on it.

So there’s something to ponder as you’re deciding which approach you want to take. Both are good. And it doesn’t have to be an either or, but it’s just important to know that both exist.

If you have questions, you’d like us to answer on the show please email them to crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will happily answer them on air for you at the soonest possible time.

Michele Amitrani: We also hope that you enjoy today’s show. As always remember to hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to the podcast and also to visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com for the show notes and the links to the resources and tools that we love and that we mentioned on this episode. Feel also free to buy us a coffee. If you find this show helpful. Until the next time guys happy writing.

Crystal Hunt: Happy writing everybody.