The easiest way to increase the odds of getting your book reviewed is to offer it to people who enjoy writing book reviews. And one of the largest and most respected network of book reviewers available to indie authors is NetGalley.

A few weeks ago, I posted this backgrounder on NetGalley and explained how it works, the costs and the various options available to self-publishers. If you aren’t familiar with the service, you might want to start there.

The interview that follows is with NetGalley’s Kristina Radke, VP of Business Growth and Engagement. Kristina was kind enough to go into detail about how authors can be more successful using the service, a breakdown of who the reviewers are, and my favorite way to use NetGalley—co-ops.

David: What books tend to do well and what don’t do well, and how do you manage the expectations of publishers and authors looking for book reviews?

Kristina: The NetGalley community is essentially a microcosm of the book market in general. So, the types of categories that see the most activity on NetGalley include genre fiction like romance, sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery/thriller. Those types of things. Also, YA of course, literary fiction, etc. Non-fiction definitely has fans, too, though! Narrative non-fiction tends to be a little more popular where something like sports might struggle a little bit, generally speaking.

It’s difficult to set explicit activity expectations because the activity can vary so widely. Activity can be influenced by not just a category that the book is placed in, but also how our features and marketing tools are being used by that publisher or the author who has signed up for an account.

As I’m sure you know, you can put the title on NetGalley and sort of lean back and wait and see what comes of it. But there are a lot of tools that allow you to integrate a book listing with the other efforts that you’re already making. Our widget, for example, which is an auto-approved link that the author can send to their own contacts or to their street team, if they have a street team.

And then, of course, we have marketing programs that are available to help boost activity to targeted lists of readers or in a specific category.

There are many authors who are still learning about the marketing process, who are using NetGalley as their way to build a platform. They are really relying on organic interest coming from the NetGalley community.

As you can imagine, there’s a really wide range of activity by title.

Who are NetGalley reviewers?

Right now (as of June 2018), we have about 430,000 members using NetGalley globally. Not every single one of those members will find or request every single one of the books that goes on NetGalley. Our member types are broken down by five different categories.

Reviewers are the largest segment of our community at about 62%. They include everything from traditional reviewers, to people who have their own dedicated book blog, to a consumer reviewer who may be posting on NetGalley, their blog, or Amazon, etc.

I think that’s probably no surprise–there are just more of them especially when you start to include consumer reviews in that category. And then from there, it breaks down to Educator at 13%, Media at 10%, Librarian at 10% and Booksellers at 5%.

This has stayed relatively stable as the community has continued to grow which is really great news. It means that no one segment of the community is far out-pacing the other.

A couple of years ago we saw increased growth in the Educator group, that one got an extra percent. But for the most part, that pie chart has looked pretty much the same since NetGalley started.

[dw note: Get in touch with NetGalley for the most up to date facts, because even though the category breakdowns stay relatively the same, the actual number of community members grows every single day.]

What about co-ops? Is that a sort of a sanctioned type of thing or do you encourage it?

We do welcome co-ops. We don’t officially reach out to people or suggest that authors or groups work together in that way, but when they come to us and already have a plan in place, we do welcome it.

When we work with co-ops, we ask for there to be one primary contact. Just from an administrative point of view, we can’t work individually with every single author who’s a part of a co-op. Of course, if an author comes to work with us one-on-one, we work with them. It’s kind of a trade-off between shared cost within a co-op and individual support through the process and access to our concierge team for help.

There are really two types of groups who represent groups of authors like this. For instance, traditional PR companies like Smith Publicity or INscribe Digital or companies like that. They do very well with NetGalley because NetGalley is just one more thing that is part of their whole media services.

With author co-ops, authors band together to save money by sharing an account. They don’t have the same resources that the marketing and PR’s do, so they are sort of relying on their own personal efforts and organic interest from the NetGalley community.

From the perspective of the persons who are managing co-op accounts, I sometimes find that they may not always anticipate everything that they’re getting into and that the administration of an account is more work than they expected.

For example, collecting all of the book information, getting the files, and then actually pressing the buttons to upload them. Then, managing requests; so saying yes or no when reviewers request that book. Then downloading the reports and doing any sort of follow-up that you might need to do.

So, on-boarding an author co-op can take more time than it does with a traditional publisher or PR Marketing service that understands the book marketing and publicity world. There are distinct differences to those two types of accounts.

More about reviewers

NetGalley is a book review service, one of 4 types of book review businesses that help self-published authors. Click here for the original NetGalley article and scroll to the bottom to learn more.