Hidden Gems Website Redesign
By: Craig on August 25, 2016
Welcome to the newly designed Hidden Gems website, the best and fastest growing site on the web for free romance ebooks!
The site is just being rolled out, and we still have a few things to fix and change, but for the most part things are working enough that we felt it was finally ready to go live.
Hopefully you like the fresh new look and snazzy new logo. I just want to tell you about some of the new and updated features of the site, and what we have planned for the future.
Fresh new look!
Of course, the main thing is our updated look and feel. Our old site was pretty sparse and dated right from the start, because we were more focused on getting our newsletter our and growing our subscriber base. But now, as we approach 5000 subscribers (wow!), we thought it was time to spend a little time on making our public face a little more appealing. Bigger graphics, better fonts, colors, layouts and searching capabilities – virtually everything was rebuilt and refreshed from the ground up. It should even look better on your mobile devices. And of course, you’ve probably already noticed our new newsletter design to match! We love it, and hope you do to!
Updated Blogs
We’ve definitely been neglectful in terms of our blogging, but we do plan to change that. So we spent some time redesigning the blog page, adding categories and images. Our hope is not only to talk about site related news, but industry news or editorials as well – perhaps even hosting some guest bloggers from other sites. If there is something specific you want us to cover, we’d LOVE to hear from you. Just send us a message via the contact form!
Improvements and expansion to our newsletter and ARC services!
As our membership continues to grow, it’s important for us to grow with it. More readers mean a more varied set of tastes. So coming in October, our Newsletter will start coming out 3 times a week instead of 2. We’re going to run on Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s. This means there will be MORE amazing free and discounted romance books to choose from! Hopefully we’ll have something for everyone, but if you ever want to send us a note to tell us about the type of book you’d like to see more of, please feel free to contact us and let us know!
Similarly, we’re going to expand our ARC program, as well as improve the process for opting in. We have another blog written specifically about that expansion, but the quick and dirty is that it will soon be running daily, and expanding to genres beyond just romance (still completely on an OPT IN basis). Do nothing and you’ll continue to just be sent Romance books, but eventually you’ll be able to request books in other genres as well. And moving to daily means more free books, leading to more choice and selection for you!
It’s also now easier to change your ARC settings. See our blog post regarding the ARC for more details.
Author Services
Specifically for our authors, we’ve now centralized the process with which they can submit their books for promotional consideration, or for ARC bookings. Everything is now done via our website, with calendars that mean no more back and forth with us about which dates are available. We also have more services geared towards helping authors planned, but as with everything else, we’re open to ideas. If you have something you want to see us do, please let us know via the contact page or email!
Thanks everyone!
The Hidden Gems team
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Craig Tuch began his own self-publishing career back in 2012, writing numerous bestselling romance novels under a variety of pen names, but has always recognized that he would never have been as successful if he hadn’t also been a part of a strong online community of authors. Through this community he not only became a better writer, but also learned what it took to get readers to discover him in the first place – because it’s not enough to simply write a great book, a self-publisher has to also master the packaging, promotion and marketing of their work. It was from this experience that he founded Hidden Gems, which he continues to run to this day with the goal of providing information and services designed to help authors spend more time writing books and less time worrying about all that other stuff.
