How many readers can I expect for my first ARC on BookSirens?
NOTE: This answer only applies to a pen name's first ARC on BookSirens. Subsequent ARCs generally get more readers assuming prior readers start following your pen name on BookSirens, thereby creating a snowball effect.
If we accept your book submission, we give you an estimate of how many readers we can show your book to. The more popular the genre, the higher the estimate. It's important to note that readers are not just seeing your book exclusively. Your book is sharing the spotlight with other books in the same genre. Readers then decide which books' ARC teams they want to join. For popular genres, readers may have several dozens of ARCs to pick from. Furthermore, to keep review rates high, we limit how many ARC teams readers can join at once.
Since there are many factors at play, it's hard to predict in advance how many readers will download a specific ARC. But, for a pen name's first ARC, you can expect on average 0 to 5 readers per month in less popular genres and 0 to 10 readers per month in more popular genres. Note that we start with 0 intentionally because we cannot guarantee every ARC will get readers. This is why, if you're on the Promote Plan, we bill per reader. Also, outliers are possible; we've witnessed some first time authors hit it out of the park with 20 or 30+ readers per month.
For fiction, success largely depends on the following factors:
- Cover
- Blurb
- Sample
- How congruent the whole package is with the genre(s) you're targeting
- Publication date (our audience primarily consists of ARC readers who prefer to pick books released in the last 30 days or with future release dates)
- Series commitment (i.e. if readers have to read prior books in the series to make sense of your book, some readers may shy away)
If, after a month, you have less than 5 readers AND your book is a new / future release in a competitive fiction genre, you may want to consider revisiting your blurb and cover, etc. More thoughts on that here.
A Note about Nonfiction
For nonfiction, titles tend to be a hit or miss because it's hard to predict how many readers will be interested in a particular niche topic. As an example, a reader may say they're interested in Business but if your book is about the Automobile Business, the reader may not necessarily be interested in that niche and it's technically difficult to know this in advance. Due to the large topical diversity of nonfiction, some books get many readers, some get a few, and some don't get any. Usually it has nothing to do with the book but just the makeup of our community's interests. But the great thing about our Promote Plan is that it's a nominal $10 to list your book. After that you only pay based on the number of readers we can find for you.