Why choose Hidden Gems to run your ARC?

Once you’ve decided that you want ARC reviewers, you essentially have 2 choices. Run an ARC yourself or outsource to a service like Hidden Gems.

Running your own ARC

Assuming you have a big enough mailing list to use for running your own ARC, there are a few reasons why you still might decide that letting us handle the reviews for your novel is a better choice.

Your fans are better off being buyers – Typical review rates, even from author mailing lists, are often abysmally low. It’s not uncommon for us to hear authors complain of getting between 10-30% of reviews back from the books they send out, and that’s from their own list of fans that asked to be on their ARC list! So if, for example, you wanted 60 reviews, that means you may need an ARC list of 200-500. It also means that you’re sending that many copies of your book out for free – to fans that like your work enough that they are likely just as eager to buy it – to only get back a handful of reviews! Hidden Gems has an average review rate of 80%, which means we not only send your book out to less people to get the same number of (or more) reviews – but you aren’t using up your own fans and potential buyers to do it!
Reach a new audience – By letting us send your book out to our list of reviewers, you’re potentially expanding your own audience by exposing new readers to your work who may become fans. It’s not uncommon for us to see comments left by reviewers saying that they loved the book and went and bought all of the author’s previous novels, or went and joined the author’s personal mailing list, etc. When you send to your own list, you’re sending to people that already know about you.
Save time and hassle – Managing an ARC properly can be time consuming. Asking readers to sign up, sending them books, dealing with their technical issues, reminding them again and again to leave reviews, trying to determine which of your readers are leaving reviews and which are just trying to get free books… all of this takes time away from what is really important – writing your next novel! So why not let us handle all that headache?
Accusations of bias – It’s not uncommon for us to see accusations of bias towards ARC reviewers that are part of an author’s team because the assumption is (rightly or wrongly), that the team is made up of superfans that will never write anything bad, or that they only write positive reviews because they’re worried about being kicked off the team if they write something negative, etc. With Amazon cracking down on biased reviews so often lately, this is an increasingly risky issue.

Okay — so why Hidden Gems and not someone else?

Reliable – Hidden Gems has been running ARCs since November 2015, and in that time has sent out over a thousand books to many thousands of readers for hundreds of authors – a large percentage of whom are repeat customers (read some of their testimonials). If you book with us, you know your ARC is going to get delivered without issue and you can expect many quality reviews.
Industry leading review percentage of over 80% – Why is our review percentage so important (i.e. why do we keep talking about it)? As we mentioned above, the review rates even from an author’s own list are sometimes very small – and that’s from fans! Building a quality list of readers that work for free and voluntarily read and review books takes a lot of time, money and effort. We didn’t start off with our current average percentages, it took us over a year to get to this level. But many ARC services don’t put the time and effort into doing that. Often these are the “cut rate” ARC review services that “guarantee” a set number of reviews for a flat rate. While it’s certainly understandable to be attracted to these, we urge you to be careful. The reason they can often offer a low price and a guarantee is because they don’t spend any time or effort into attracting quality readers. That means their review rates are often even worse than the typical 10-30% that authors get. In order to get you 100 guaranteed reviews, they may be sending your book out to thousands of readers. They don’t care, because it’s cheaper and easier for them to send the book out to an unqualified list of 2000 readers than to spend the time and money to build a quality list that would allow them to only send to 100 – but then that is 2000 potential customers that no longer have to buy your book. And some just send your book out to their entire list, not taking the time to match your story with readers interested in that type of book, which often leads to many more negative reviews. The trade-off may not seem like such a bargain when you consider those factors, but if you do decide to work with a company like that, stay informed. Ask them how many readers they’re sending your book out to in order to get your guaranteed number, and then make sure that number makes sense to you. Ensure that their readers like your type of book! Hidden Gems sends your book out to a fraction of these readers for the same number of reviews. Better yet, we send your book info (metadata) to thousands of our readers when asking for volunteers – and then we select the readers from the pool that signed up for your specific book based on those details. That means thousands of readers just heard about your great novel but didn’t get it sent to them. How’s that for free advertising?
Honest (less risky) – While it may be tempting to hire a service that has a guarantee on number of reviews or star ratings, the danger with many of those services is that the reviews are not real. In order to meet a guarantee (without sending to thousands of readers as mentioned in the above point) in terms of raw reviews or star ratings, the service may be employing reviewers who are not following Amazon’s guidelines of unbiased and voluntary reviews. Some services employ fake readers to meet those guarantees, and those reviewers are very likely to at best, get removed by Amazon but at worst, land the author in a lot of trouble with Amazon. All of our readers are honest, real people that regularly and voluntarily leave reviews with no quotas or expectations as to the star rating, etc.