HGB Points are used to reserve books, and you can earn them in a variety of ways.  We introduced these points as a way to allow our most active ARC readers to read even more books. However, all ARC readers (unless your gem level is Cracked) will always get enough points to reserve at least 1 book a day.

So if you want to completely ignore the idea of points and only ever want to reserve one book a day, you can ignore the rest of this section.

For those that want to have the ability to reserve more than 1 book a day, here’s all you need to know.

Earning HGB Points

There are various ways you can earn points.

• Daily Points – Simply logging into your account every day will earn you points!  That’s right, for each day that you login, you’ll be awarded at least 100 points. And you’ll probably want to visit us daily anyway to check out the new ARC books that are available. This allows everyone to be able to get at least 1 book every day they log in to get one.
• Filling out your reader form – Filling out your reader form with your review link or reason for not reviewing will earn points. And if you leave more than 1 review for a book that is looking for reviews on multiple sites, you can earn even more points!
• Gem Level Bonuses -The higher your gem level, the more points you earn. You can see the full list of points on the gem level page, but as an example, if your gem level is Flawless (the highest level), you will earn 200 daily points (instead of 100) and your points awarded for filling out your reader form will be multiplied by 3!

Point MAX Caps and Point Bank

Each gem level has a point cap, which is the max number of points you can store. So if your level is Sparkling, for example, your maximum point cap is set at 350.  That means if you get up to 350 points, you won’t earn any more until you spend some reserving a book.  But the higher your gem level, the higher your point cap.

However, that means that if you drop in gem levels, your point cap will become smaller. If you had more points than your new point cap can hold, those points will be removed. But fear not, they aren’t lost forever. Those points will be stored in your point bank and if you regain your previous gem level they will be restored.

For example, if you had 350 points and were Sparkling and then dropped down to Dimming where the point cap is 270, your available points would become 270 but the 80 points that were lost will be added to your point bank and returned if you get back to the Sparkling level.

Any additions or subtractions of points due to gem levels and your point bank will be noted in your announcements window.

Using Points

Points are used for reserving books (although other uses for them may come in the future). Most of the time books are 100 points, which means that if you have 200 points, you can reserve 2 books that day, and the next day you’ll get at least 100 new points that you can use to reserve another one.