The self-publishing landscape is constantly evolving, and the most successful authors understand that no matter what level they’re at in their career, there is always more to learn. This blog has (and will continue to be) a great forum for helping us share information on new ways to improve your writing or book marketing, but these days a lot of people prefer content that they can consume on the go, or while doing other things – which explains the growing popularity of the audiobook and podcast formats.

That’s why Roland (Ginger) and I have launched the new Hidden Gems Author Podcast. Every Thursday, you’ll be able to listen to us discuss new topics with greater depth than is possible in the blog, and often with guests that are either experts in the subject, or have been affected by whatever issue it is we’re discussing. There is so much to learn from the experiences of others, and we’re grateful to have access to such a wide variety of authors willing to tell their stories and share their knowledge with the rest of the self-publishing community.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: One of the best parts about running Hidden Gems is that it keeps me immersed in the author community, and continues to provide me with the opportunity to meet and work with so many wonderful and talented writers.

In the past, I’ve attributed much of the success that I had as an author myself (back when I was writing romance, under a wide variety of pen names) to the author community that I was part of when I first got started. It was back when self-publishing was new, and we were all figuring things out together, sharing what we learned, and growing together as a result.

That’s what I’ve always tried to emulate with Hidden Gems. While it’s not a message board and doesn’t have any sort of open forum discussion functionality, the author blog (and occasionally my weekly author newsletter) is my attempt to continue to provide that free flow of information to all authors. Not just from me, because I certainly don’t know everything, but through guest posts and other regular contributors like Roland (or Ginger, as he’s often referred to on this site).

The information we share comes from a variety of sources – our own experimentation, traditional type research, or most valuable of all, the community of authors that we work with on a regular basis. We’re always learning from you, and we try to return the favor by sharing that info back so that we all improve together. After all, readers don’t just read books from a single author – they read lots of books, from lots of authors, and are constantly discovering new favorites. Unlike many industries, authors aren’t really in competition with each other. We don’t need to step on the backs of our fellow writers in order to pull ourselves up higher.

In fact, an author that writes a great book and succeeds in marketing it well enough to have it discovered by a new audience can benefit us all, because that book may serve to spark the imagination of new readers, leading them to discover the joy of books and turning them into a potential customer of many more of us over their lifetime.

That’s why I’m so proud to announce the expansion of that ideal with our new podcast. This blog will continue as it always has, but there are a lot of advantages to adding a podcast as well.

Why start another author podcast?

I do realize that there are other author focused podcasts out there already, which may lead some to wonder why bother starting another one?  Well, my response to that would be to ask why have more than one of anything? Why do you need Pizza Hut if you have Dominos? And then why would you need Little Caesars, too?  Why have Wendy’s and Burger King in a world where McDonald’s exists? 

Or, if you aren’t currently as hungry as I obviously am, why should bookstores stock more than one fantasy novel about dragons, or many different romance novels featuring billionaires?

There are lots of listeners out there, some of whom have the time and interest to listen to more than one podcast that may help them improve their careers. Others may only have time for one, but might not always care for the topic of a particular podcast, which means multiple options give them more variety. Or maybe they prefer some podcasters over others.

There are plenty of reasons why the market can support another author podcast in general, but here are a few of the particular reasons why Roland and I decided to start a Hidden Gems version.

Double the content

By adding a weekly podcast on top of our weekly blog, we effectively double the amount of free (and hopefully helpful) content we’re bringing to authors. It’s actually more than double because of…

Greater topic depth

A podcast allows us to go into greater depth on the topics that need it. While the goal is to keep each episode to around 45 mins or so, that still provides far more content than the typical blog article of 1000-2000 words (or even the really long ones that I tend to write, which are closer to 4000). 

For the curious, the average speaking speed is about 150 words per minute, which means a 45 min podcast contains close to 7000 words.

Auditory vs visual learning

Some people are more auditory learners than visual, and thus find it easier to absorb information by listening to it rather than reading it.

More time efficient

Some people find that listening to content is more efficient, as it allows them to consume that content while doing other things, such as commuting to work or working out. Podcasts and audiobooks let people multitask.

More guests and experts

A podcast allows us to talk with other authors or industry experts, making the discussions far more valuable as they can provide us with insight and alternate viewpoints than what we may have considered.

They also allow us to dig into case study type examples, by speaking with authors willing to go into details about something they’ve done or experienced that we want to know more about.  These are actually some of my favorite types of discussions, because the stories are often a great example of someone just like us that found great success, sometimes suddenly and almost unexpectedly.  Not undeservedly, they did it through work and experimentation and their success was a reflection of that, but often that success came after a lot of failure, which was why having something finally work can make it seem unexpected and sudden. There is so much to learn from these stories, not the least of which is the lesson that we should never give up.

Podcast details

Okay, now that I’ve explained why we’re starting this and hopefully given you reason enough to at least give us a try, let’s go over how to find the new podcast.

From this website, there’s a new podcast link at the top right that will take you to the Hidden Gems Author Podcast page.  From there you’ll see all the current episodes. There are 3 so far, with new episodes published each Thursday morning.  From that page, you can drill into any episode, and you’ll find the links to the podcast on all of the available popular sites, as well as the option to just watch or listen to them directly from that page via the embedded players.

(Note that I say “watch” because we actually record each episode as video and post it to YouTube for anyone interested in actually seeing us chat with each other and our guests vs just listening to us through the more traditional audio only format.)

New Episodes:

• Thursdays – 8am EST

Available on:

• YouTube
• Apple
• Spotify
• Amazon
• Google

Thanks everyone, I hope you give us a listen and enjoy the podcast. If so, please consider subscribing on your platform of choice, liking the episodes, giving us 5 star ratings, etc – all of those things help immensely.  And if you have any ideas for future topics you’d like us to cover, guest suggestions (someone you want to hear us talk to, even if it’s yourself), or anything else, please feel free to let us know either via email or the comment section below.

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Wondering what all the fuss about reviews and ARC teams are?  Got some time to listen to a podcast that breaks it all down for you?

I was a recent guest on Jonny Andrews’ Author Platform Rocket podcast to talk about reviews, ARC teams, what reviews can and can’t do for your book and what Amazon does or doesn’t allow.  It was a lot of fun, and if you’re an author trying to get a handle on what all this ARC review stuff is, I encourage you to give it a listen.   Whether you’re building your own team or looking to hire someone like Hidden Gems to run it for you, we probably talk about something of interest.

And for those of you that do run your own ARC team, there’s something of special interest you might want to hear about.  A little sneak preview of an upcoming service we’re just about ready to roll out that will make even your life a little easier.

Unfamiliar with Author Platform Rocket?  APR is an author marketing company that reaches up to 3 million readers per week while working with over 16,000 authors sell more books and grow their platforms. It’s something every author should at least look into.

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Getting free ARC books and becoming a book reviewer has never been so easy, and now you can do it for all genres and without the hassles of the past!

If you scour the web in search of book reviews and becoming an ARC reader, you’ll find plenty of articles describing how you can contact publishers or authors directly, sign up for their various mailing lists, and hopefully get free books from them whenever they actually release one (usually not more than once a month or two).

That was certainly the best way to go about it in the past.

But things are different now, and we’d like to think we helped pave the way to change.

Hidden Gems has been sending out ARC books for authors for about two years now (our first one went out in October 2015) and since then we’ve grown from 2 or 3 a week and only romance (hence our url), to more than 1 per day in all genres. Our list of ARC readers/reviewers has grown into the thousands and we’ve helped hundreds of authors, big and small, well known and just starting out, reach new audiences and help show other potential buyers that their books are worth taking a chance on.

After all, that’s the point of a good review, isn’t it? Demonstrate to anyone looking at a book, trying to decide whether to buy it or not, that others have already taken a chance and read it – and this is what they thought.

In bringing authors to a central place to send out their books, we’ve taken a lot of the work out of getting a ton of free content for our readers. The authors come to them, instead of them going to the authors. If you’re a voracious reader that goes through a novel a day, you’d have to sign up for about 30 or more ARC lists to satisfy your hunger – at least if you wanted all those books for free. With Hidden Gems, we can fill your appetite for new content all in one place. Whether you look to read romance or hard Science Fiction, Cookbooks or Self-Help, you can get it all in one place.

Is the Hidden Gems ARC Service legitimate?

Short Answer: Absolutely.

Long Answer:

A while back, Amazon made news by cracking down on a lot of sites that offered “reviews” of products – not just books, but anything and everything that they sold on their site. The problem was that vendors were simply paying services to give them fake 5-star reviews to boost their ratings. These services would either supply the fake reviews themselves, or farm out the work to a bunch of accounts to do it for them. Either way, that’s obviously not good for anyone and so Amazon, rightly, shut the whole thing down and stopped allowing unverified reviews on any products EXCEPT for books.

The reason for this exception is that the idea of ARC reviews on novels has a long history that pre-dates even Amazon. Publishers and authors have always sent out free Advance Review Copies of their books in order to gather up early reviews and create buzz. The important distinction here is that they send out the books for free (the actual reviewers are not compensated, beyond getting a free copy of the book) and that the reviews are unbiased (and note in their review that they received a free copy of the book, for transparency reasons). That means if a book is poor, it’s going to get poor reviews.

That’s a chance the publisher/author takes.

Hidden Gems works this same way. ALL of our readers are legitimate and unbiased – free and encouraged to leave completely honest reviews of the books we send them. They are not compensated in any way, beyond getting a free e-copy of the book, and all we ask is that they do their best to leave reviews of the books they request (we don’t just blindly send out books to our readers, they opt in to each book they are sent ) on a regular basis – however even here we are not forcing anyone to leave reviews for any particular books. We understand that sometimes life gets in the way, or you decide you don’t want to leave a review for a particular book, and that’s okay. We get it.

What does Hidden Gems expect of their readers?

You have to love books and love reading, otherwise why would you even want to be part of an ARC program anyway?

You have to be willing to voluntary and regularly leave reviews of the books we send you. Again, we understand you may not get to all of them, but we only send you the books you specifically request (and even then, depending on the genre and the number of readers an author is looking for, you may not get all of the ones you request) so our hope is that you can manage your time enough to only request the books you’ll have time to read over a period of at least a week, and then hopefully leave a review of what you read. An HONEST and FAIR review of what you thought of the book. Not a copy and paste of every other review you’ve ever written and preferably not a three word “It was great!” type thing, but something thought out enough to help other readers decide if they want to read that book. But again, that’s up to you and the time you have – just remember that authors are sending these books out for free in the hopes of getting back these reviews, and if they aren’t getting back anything useful then they’ll probably stop sending out free copies – and that isn’t good for anyone!

Ready to start getting a ton of free content to fill your kindles and tablets?

Then click here to sign up

The more readers we have, the more fabulous the books we can attract, so please feel free to share this article, or just the sign-up link, with everyone you know – post it on social media, use the links below to tweet and share it – and let’s continue to make Hidden Gems the best ARC program on the web!

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This article about the Hidden Gems ARC program is out of date, but a new one has been published here.

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The post The Hidden Gems ARC Program appeared first on HiddenGemsBooks.

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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