January 19 , 2017

NetGalley Update

Our NetGalley service has been up and running for over a month. You can see in the production schedule what periods are reserved for each title. We are typically allowing a 60-day window for a book to be reviewed on NetGalley prior to being released. We are subscribed to permit up to 10 titles active per month.
So far, we have seen an average of 60 requests to read each galley. If reviews are generated from this at the rate NetGalley estimated, we should see an 80% review rate -- or at least 48 reviews per title. You might recall Amazon needing 50+ reviews in order to start suggesting your book to other customers on the site.
We are hoping to see, by the end of the month, an average of over 100 readers per title. The names and email addresses of these potential reviewers will be available to you and could provide the beginning of a nice email list. I encourage you to send a personal note gently reminding each to post their reviews on NetGalley, GoodReads, and Amazon. Let me know if you would like a list of your reviewers.
You might notice we now are assigning fixed dates for releases. We have selected the first Tuesday of each month as our "Pub Day" when our releases for the month will be available to the masses. Why Tuesdays? Believe it or not, it seems to be an ideal day in the media industry for releases. We decided the first Tuesday would usually give us a window after the expiration of the NetGalley for each title. Please note, these dates are targets -- estimates of what we believe the schedule will be. As we build more internal structure and process, we will get better at hitting these targets, but these dates are subject to change for a variety of reasons -- the pace of editing, the availability of the author, changing priorities, etc. You will also note there are a few exceptions to the First Tuesday rule. If you have a specific date in mind, please let me know.
Lastly, all of this newfound structure has provided us with a window to offer titles for pre-order during the NetGalley phase. The various distributors require we have a finished product -- or near-finished product in order to set up for pre-orders. This is now possible because we need the same materials for NetGalley. We have yet to see the impact of this, having only set a couple of titles so far. Regardless, as soon as your cover is designed and ISBN assigned, we are at least setting your title up in our eCommerce system. We will turn on pre-orders there around the same time.