Ask A Book Nerd: Are reviewers making bank selling advance review copies they get for free?

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One of my favorite things about running a book blog is all the people who ask me for book recommendations and for other advice about their reading lives.

This inspired the creation of a series called Ask a Book Nerd! A literary advice column.

Here’s the latest question…

Is there a big network of in-league reviewers who got ARCs and send them to an online store for a kickback?

Or worded another way: Are reviewers making bank selling the advance review copies they get for free from publishers to review those books?

To answer simply, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, NO.

I’m thrilled someone asked me this because this question comes up every few months in the writerly discourse on Twitter and it gets nasty fast because the question assumes that book reviewers exist to take advantage of writers and publishers, rather than promote and support the work they do.

I think the recurring panic about reviewers supposedly getting rich off selling review copies comes from authors who simply aren’t family with book blogging and marketing for their work. That’s unfortunate because being an author who’s plugged into the bookternet is such a fantastic way to cultivate and support a community of readers who love their books.

It also doesn’t make sense to me that an author would be hung up about their review copies for a couple of reasons. Generally, if a book is anticipated to be big enough to warrant review copies, the author has a marketing budget that’s handled by their publisher. Yes, some authors are savvy marketers and might have a say in getting some review copies in some reviewers’ hands, but generally, that’s done by the marketing department, not the individual author. And if you have a marketing team whose job it is to promote your book, I can’t imagine getting pissed at them for sending review copies to reviewers. That’s literally their job and part of the process of building book buzz.

Not to mention there’s a big warning on the cover that says “advance uncorrected proofs NOT FOR SALE.” And when it says uncorrected, they really mean uncorrected! The story is there, but often the formatting is weird and there are a couple dozen grammatical errors that will all get sorted out before the book is actually published.

Bookstores also know that ARCs aren’t meant to be sold so used bookstores won’t take them. (Actually, a lot of bookstores get ARCs from publishers and probably have a stack they’re trying to get rid of. Booksellers take the ones they want home but the rest might be given away to customers buying other books or recycled.) So the only way a sale would take place is one-on-one between the reviewer and a buyer and the buyer will see the NOT FOR SALE on the cover and know it was ethically wrong for them to buy it.

Obviously, there are going to be some bad actors but on the whole, reviewers aren’t going around selling ARCs. Especially since if you’re caught you’re not likely to get ARCs in the future. As a reviewer myself I can say there's generally a code of ethics that reviewers adhere to and that means not selling review copies of books. Most reviewers I know either pass galleys on to other reviewers or discard them in Little Free Libraries.

That’s what I do––I first ask my fellow reviewer friends if they’re interested in reviewing the title and if not I put the ARCs in a Little Free Library. I’d hate to recycle a perfectly readable book––that’s just not how I roll. I also end up keeping a lot of the ARCs for the books I really enjoy because I’ve often made notes in the margins and that marginalia ends up in my review. Sometimes my ARCs become just as precious to me as the finished copy of the book, which I almost always end up buying.

There are also finished review copies which are the finalized, published version of the book that gets sent to reviewers. Those are harder to come by for small publication reviewers and bloggers, so if someone wants a finished review copy bad enough to get one they tend to keep them. Technically you could sell a finished review copy since it’s a normal book that you just got early for review purposes. But even the sell back value of a fresh off the press book is not that much unless it's a textbook, so reviewers aren't making more than pennies off selling even finished review copies. The ROI just isn't there.

However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the worst-case scenario and assume a reviewer is selling their ARCs. They’d probably get at most $10 for the book and that’s a generous estimate. Depending on the length of the book, they would’ve spent probably 5 to 10 hours reading it, plus around an hour writing the review. So at most they’d be getting $10 for 6 hours of work, likely far less. Like I said, the ROI doesn’t make sense.

On top of that, say they have 800 blog readers and a 5% conversion rate. That would mean 40 people bought the book because of them, thus making the author and publisher far more than the $10 they got for selling the ARC. So either way you slice it, fussing over reviewers and their ARCs doesn’t make sense.

Mostly, I just wish folks would quit worrying about what reviewers do with books after they’ve been reviewed. It’s really not as exciting, dramatic, or nefarious as people like to believe.