If you’ve been with Hidden Gems for a while, you will have noticed a change to the ARC sign up emails we send out. In the past, your emails would have only shown the books available in the genres that you have selected and all of the book details were displayed, with a button to sign up for the book directly in the email. When you clicked that button, you would be navigated to the website to let you know if the sign up was successful or not.

A single short email giving the highlights (covers and genres) of ALL books available

In the current emails, you now see a much shorter email with just the genres and covers of ALL the new books available for sign up (regardless of your preferences) and to see the details (blurb, sub categories, word count, etc) and sign up simply click a book to go to your dashboard and you can still do all of that.

There were a number of reasons for these changes, although one of the biggest was the fact that depending on the size and content of the blurbs, many of those sign up emails were getting lost to spam and junk folders, causing readers to miss them  entirely.  Another reason was that sometimes books would be offered that didn’t fit genres very neatly, and thus they may have appealed to those that didn’t sign up for that particular genre that the author chose for them – yet those potential readers would never even be aware that they existed.

Dashboard still filters books based on your genres and shows all details and allows quick sign up

Most of what we were using the emails for can now be done better on your new dashboard, with the emails remaining as more of a daily notification of all the potential new free ARC books that are available to readers.  To keep the emails tight and less likely to get flagged as spam or junk, we now only display the covers and genres of all the books available but when you click to go to your dashboard your genre filters will be applied and you will only see the books that match your preferences, along with all the details and the sign up button. The difference is, now if you happened to see a cover in your email from a genre outside your normal interests and wish to read more about it – you can!  Just go to Your Settings tab and update your genres of interest.  Immediately, when you return to your New ARCs Available tab, you’ll see an updated list of available books based on your new genre selections.

ARC sign up notification emails can be turned off

And while these emails are still a useful notification of new ARC titles and a reminder about the program, for those that are in the habit of visiting your dashboard regularly anyway, you can even turn them off on Your Profile Links tab. While we don’t recommend doing this for most people (the reminders can be very useful), there are some that prefer less emails but still want to participate in the program and this allows the best of both worlds. (Note you may still get occasional emails about incomplete reader forms and the email letting you know that you were selected for a book that you signed up for).