As an author, you likely understand that one of the barriers to selling your book is word of mouth. Taking a chance on a new book is a lot easier if you can see that others have already read it. But if you’re a new author without an established following, or even if you have a few releases under your belt but just released something new, how do you get enough reviews?

Leave that to the Hidden Gems ARC program.

While we now accept reviews on a variety of platforms, we still run our ARC program in accordance with Amazon’s rules and Community Guidelines, which state that authors and publishers can provide free copies of their books to readers, as long as they do not require a review or attempt to influence the review.

Hidden Gem ARC readers are made up of volunteers that enjoy reading and reviewing books. They choose the books they want to read, and although they are not required to leave a review for every book (there are plenty of valid reasons why they may not be able to/want to leave a review for a particular book), we do monitor our subscribers to make sure they continue to have time to participate in general. This has led us to an industry leading average review rate of over 80%, for the books we send to our readers.

All reviews are honest and uninfluenced, which means that whether these reviews are positive or negative is determined by the quality of your book. However, we do our best to match your book up with readers specifically interested in your type of story (so that we don’t send your paranormal romance to readers that are only interested in contemporary, for example), which will at least give you the best chance at impressing them!

Again, to be clear, these are HONEST reviews from volunteers that we cannot force to leave reviews. This means we do not guarantee that you will get a 5-star review from a book that isn’t very good, nor can we guarantee that if we send your book to 100 readers you will get 100 reviews. But because we’ve been running our ARC service for close to a decade, we know that most books get at least 80 in that scenario. Number of reviews is often also determined by quality, however, since some reviewers choose not to leave a review for a book they didn’t connect with, or don’t feel they can leave a fair or honest review for a book they couldn’t even finish.

Important Note: No refunds are offered for books that get fewer than expected readers, low review scores, or less than average number of reviews. These factors are mainly determined by how appealing the book is and quality of the story/writing, which are factors we have no control over. Remember that these reviewers are real people leaving their honest and uninfluenced opinions. Hidden Gems is also not responsible for any reviews that are removed from review sites in the future, for whatever reason.