All About ARCs
Hello! It’s been a minute, I know. There was a small lull behind the scenes, and now everything is happening at once. Golden Ruin got its beautiful cover, got added to Goodreads and Storygraph (that was a whole ordeal), is set up for preorder, and is being finalized for wide distribution. The most exciting and nerve wracking development is that ARCs have been sent out as of this morning! I wanted to share my first ARC experience for those who felt as lost as I did. It can be hard to have a baseline for how to run an ARC campaign and what to expect. I’ll break down the numbers, what I did, and how I sent them out.
I first want to say I did get lucky in terms of marketing. I had a TikTok reach 15k views in the middle of my advertising campaign, and I feel like that did a lot of the heavy lifting towards the numbers you’ll see in just a second. And by luck I do mean luck. I posted this exact style of video 5 or 6 times and this particular one just happened to pop off. You can see that video here.
I had sign-ups open from 7/1/24 - 8/12/24. I set up an ARC form directly on my website so it would count towards my analytics. Plus, I feel like you should drive as much traffic directly to your website as possible. The less chance for people to drop off along the way, the better. Squarespace has a neat option to sync Google Sheets to your forms, so I had all my data automatically inputted for me. That made things a breeze when it was time to actually set up my email list and how I have this spiffy data to share.
Total Sign-ups: 199
Tiktok: 142
Threads: 32
Instagram: 12
Word of mouth: 3
*BookSirens: 10
I posted a static feed post on Instagram as well as stories here and there. I did boost the post, but did not find it very helpful. Looking back at the data, I didn't have anyone clicking through on the link in my stories to sign up. I think those that signed up from this platform had already been aware I was looking for ARC readers or were other authors I’d been interacting with. I only posted in feed the once, so to be fair I did not try very hard to generate interest here.
Threads was pretty sporadic. I posted when I could, but got very little traction on most of my posts. I tried a few different formats to draw attention, but no one post seemed to do significantly better than others. I got a much better response when I replied to other people’s posts asking for ARC signups and recommendations. Luckily, once I started doing this the Threads algorithm took over and showed me a ton of similar posts.
TikTok was where I put the most effort in. I posted twice a day in the morning and at night. At the time, at least, it was the only platform that seemed to be showing my posts to new viewers, rather than just a small portion of my audience. This meant I could post the same videos over and over and still draw in new people. I am lucky my “viral” post only went baby viral, I got positive responses and no hate, which is pretty rare for the internet.
For the actual distribution I went with the standard (that I’ve seen) which is BookFunnel. I started on their $20 annual plan, but once I hit that boost in TikTok and started getting more sign-ups, I decided to upgrade to the next plan solely because that tier offered watermarking on all files. I also signed up for BookSirens and chose to accept 10 readers. I am interested to see if the quality and rate of review is different coming from a dedicated ARC site rather than through my own marketing efforts. BookSirens does charge $10 to add a book if accepted, and $2 per reader from their site. I, again, was lucky to get most of my readers for free, so I did not feel the need to spend more than a bit to satisfy my curiosity.
My goal when starting the ARC process was to get 50 signups. For the first few weeks I had around 22, and it felt like this goal was too high. Once TikTok got rolling, or I had a good day on Threads, then the number kept climbing. I am so grateful there are so many people interested in my story, and I am SO excited (and a bit nervous) to see what they think. I might make another blog post, or maybe leave a comment on this one, with follow-up data and thoughts once reviews start coming in.
But, overall, the ARC process was very exciting and humbling. I have seen authors cancel ARCs due to piracy, reader behavior, and other factors. I get those fears, and I’m sad that was their experience. But, I do think ARCs are a great opportunity to build a community and get your book in the hands of those who are most excited to hype it up. If you are considering offering ARCs, I say go for it.
That’s all for now. I’ll have more updates soon (I hope)!
<3 Emma
