STACKED

books

All About ARCs: The Ins and Outs of Using and Abusing Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs)

|

Remember ARC Gate?

I wrote about it here a year ago. There were many, many responses, including those that agreed with me and those which disagreed with me. There was an article in Publishers Weekly. It led to a discussion about putting together a presentation for ALA Annual this year on the topic of ARCs and how they’re used.

Liz Burns, Kristi Chadwick, and myself put together a proposal, which was accepted, and we invited Jen Childs (Random House) and Victoria Stapleton (Little, Brown) to join us in talking about the topic of ARCs and how they’re used in the book world.

Because we wanted this to be a presentation about ARCs and how they’re used by those who use them, we wanted to ask people to tell us how it is they use ARCs, how they get them, what they do with them, and so forth. You may remember we put together a short survey a few months ago on the topic, and here are the results!

We had an overwhelming response. 476 people responded. Since 2 responses were non-ARC users, most of the results below are out of a total of 474 responses.

First, we asked how do you identify yourself?

For the purposes of simplicity, I had to make decisions on people’s profession/affiliation when it wasn’t 100% clear. The bulk of respondents called themselves librarians (162), bloggers (129), librarian and blogger (104), teacher and blogger (31), other industry professional (22), book seller (15), and teacher (11).

“Other industry professional” was my way of putting those who fell outside one of the clearer categories into a space, and it included print journalists, archivists, author, trade reviewer, editors, or those who chose not to put an affiliation down.

As seen, librarians made up the majority of our responses, followed closely by bloggers, then librarians who also blog.

We followed that up with what kind of ARCs do you use? We offered three options: print, eARC, or both. Because I was curious if there was anything at all relating to affiliation and ARC use, I broke down the responses in that manner.

Far and away, the bulk of all ARC users try both print and eARCs. A total of 311 responses indicated using both. Print only ARC users made up for 138 responses and eARC only responses made up a tiny 24 responses.

I broke this particular question down by profession since we were curious what librarians were using. I included librarians who blog within this breakdown, as well. It will make sense why I looked at this particular demographic and not the others later on in the data.

Over 66% (176) of the librarians and librarian bloggers used a mix of both print and eARCs. Almost 30% (77) used print only, leaving a very tiny margin — a total of 12 responses — who use only eARCs.

Some of the interesting data points I teased out of this: none of the teacher responses, none of the bookseller responses, and none of the “other” responses indicated using eARCs. I suspect a large part of why those who identified as only teachers did not use eARCs is because it means they cannot then use those books with their classrooms unless they purchase a copy. It cannot be put into their classroom libraries or used with the kids. I cannot make conjectures on the other affiliations and why they may not use eARCs, but remember, they represented a much smaller portion of responses.

Our next question was How do you get ARCs? We allowed responses to come from pre-designed answers, but we had an option for “other,” which will be explained.

The options were:

  • Sent to work 
  • I request from the publisher
  • I request from Netgalley
  • I request from Edelweiss
  • Pick up at conferences/trade shows
  • Trade with friends/colleagues
  • Purchase them
  • Receive them unsolicited*
After going through all of the responses, I added another category to simplify data collection, which is “receive them unsolicited.” The bulk of those who indicated they received ARCs unsolicited were bloggers (which includes librarian and teacher bloggers).
Numerically, it breaks down like this:
  • Netgalley requests: 313
  • Conference/Trade shows: 247
  • Get at work: 206
  • Request from publisher: 203
  • Trade with friends/colleagues: 178
  • Edelweiss requests: 153
  • Sent unsolicited: 35
What’s interesting about this data is that Netgalley requests are by and away the most popular way to get ARCs. Though it was noted above that eARC use only is the lowest popularity in terms of the type of ARCs used, the bulk of readers who use ARCs use both print and eARCs. This suggests — though this wasn’t explicitly asked — that those who do use both print and eARCs may use eARCs frequently and regularly. There’s actually a lot that could be explored from this data alone — do those who use eARCs read more? Do they request more? Do they have a high accept and completion rate? None of those were questions we looked at, but they look like opportunities for further exploration. 
Note that we do not have a bar for “purchase them” as a means of acquiring ARCs. There were responses for this, but they were below the 35 responses of having ARCs sent unsolicited. Also worth noting is that wrapped in the response of “sent to work” were those bloggers who had ARCs sent to their home for review. So, the “sent unsolicited” answers may be those who could have selected “sent to work” and vice versa. We were not as clear in that response as we could have been, as our thought was “sent to work” meant to the library, book store, or school. 
Since we left this a question with the option for “other,” we did receive other responses. They’re interesting:
  • Win from contests: 30
  • Sent from the author (both solicited and unsolicited): 19
  • Review for trade journal: 10
  • Purchase them: 8
  • Bookstore partnerships: 6
  • Part of a YALSA/Award committee: 4
  • Library free pile: 2
  • Baker & Taylor review program: 2
  • Local librarian review group: 2
  • Online tour/sharing groups: 2
  • Work for publishing company: 1
  • Amazon Vine: 1
  • Publishing friends: 1
  • Ask the authors: 1
The followup question is at the heart of why we wanted to do this presentation, which is this: Where and how do you use ARCs?
As with the previous question, we had a list of options, as well as space for respondents to fill in additional answers. Our options included:
  • Collection development
  • Read for review — place of work
  • Read for review — blog
  • For groups at work (teen advisory board, etc)
  • Read for pleasure
Because there were a number of other responses that could be grouped into categories, I made a few categories after the survey closed:
  • Prizes or giveaways
  • Social media reviews (Goodreads, Amazon, Twitter — anything not a “blog”)
  • Author event preparation
  • Classroom libraries
  • Share with other readers
  • Committee reading
  • Reader’s advisory/”staying current”
  • Workshop or presentation prep
  • Deciding book club titles
  • To fill the school library**
Note that these graphs use different legend variants — I had to break them into two charts, and obviously, the scale changed because of the number of responses. So the larger bars in the second chart do not necessarily indicate a larger number of responses.

These responses came from all affiliations in our survey. So it makes sense that the highest number of responses came with “review for blog” at 295. Other top responses were personal reading (280), collection development (201), for groups at work (111), and review for work.

To break this down further, I pulled out the responses from everyone but those who affiliated as bloggers only (so this still includes librarians and teachers who also identified as bloggers), and the responses looked a bit different. Again note the scales are different since this graph needed to be broken up.

The top response in this set for how ARCs are used is personal reading (273). That response trumped all of the others which were top responses, including collection development (196), blog review (170), groups at work (109), and review for work (69).

** One of the responses listed above was “to fill the school library.” For anyone unaware yet, this is not an ethical practice. ARCs have their use in classroom libraries or any of the other purposes listed above, but to use as a means of creating a school library is not an ethical use of ARCs. Fortunately, this was a single response.

Our next question was what do you do with your ARCs when you are finished with them?


Again, we offered a series of response options, and we also allowed for responses to be submitted. These were the options:

  • Add to personal collection (300)
  • Give to colleagues or friends (227)
  • Give away at the library on a free shelf (58)
  • Give away to interested patrons (146)
  • Sell them (7)
After reading through the responses, I made a few more rough categories, which included:
  • Recycle/trash them (29)
  • Donate them — to hospitals, shelters, detention centers (23)
  • Use as prizes (18)
  • Add to classroom library (15)
  • Blog giveaways (9)
  • Donate to school library (6)
  • Donate to library (4)
  • Add to library collection (4)***
  • Donate to thrift store (7)
  • Craft use (2)
  • Bookswap websites (1)
  • Freecycle (1)
  • ARCs Float On / ARCycling (3)
  • Donate to library book sale (1)
  • Other (3)
  • Only use eARCs (2)
In short, from these responses it’s clear that ARCs get around. Even if people keep them in their personal collection, many also indicated they share these with colleagues and friends. They are donated to places that can take and use them. 
*** As noted above, ARCs shouldn’t be put into collections for libraries. But this is still a really small number. 
Our final questions were about the buying and selling of ARCs. The questions were simple and straightforward. Since this survey was anonymous, we feel responses were honest and genuine. 
Have you ever bought or sold ARCs?


Out of our 474 responses, 53 noted they have purchased ARCs. A total of 16 have sold ARCs. Because these numbers were small, I collapsed the data together, so the following charts are for those who have bought AND sold ARCs together. I didn’t see a reason to separate them. 
So who is buying and selling ARCs?
Librarian-bloggers, librarians, and bloggers were among the most likely to buy and/or sell ARCs in this survey. The numbers are small compared to the total number who took the survey. 
If you’ve bought or sold ARCs, where have you purchased them or sold them?


These were the answers. I did separate these out as “bought” vs. “sold”:
  • Bookstore: Bought (37)
  • Bookstore: Sold (11)
  • Library Book Sale: Bought (12)
  • Ebay: Bought (5)
  • Ebay: Sold (3)
  • Thriftstore: Bought (3)
  • Amazon: Bought (3)
  • Amazon: Sold (1)
  • Conference: Bought (1)
What’s interesting about this data is comparing it to the responses to what people do with their ARCs when they’re finished. Some donate them to bookstores or thrift stores or book sales. And then it’s not a super surprise there are people who respond to having purchased ARCs through these places with things like “I didn’t realize I bought an ARC until after.” Because that was a response that appeared numerous times throughout this set of questions.
Worth noting: every response about purchasing from Amazon noted they didn’t know they were buying an ARC. Half Price Books was cited in over half the responses for where ARCs were being bought AND sold. 
What to do with this data?

I’m not doing anything with it except laying it out there. I think the data actually raises a lot more interesting questions and places for consideration when ti comes to ARC use. I’m curious about why there aren’t more eARC only users when it’s clear eARCs are being requested far and away more than print ARCs are. 
ARCs get used. That’s the biggest take away. 
So what more to know about ARCs?

You can check out our entire visual presentation about ARCs, which is primarily these graphs again, right here.

Another dimension of our ARC survey was from authors themselves. We posed the question of what differences they saw between their ARCs and finished copies. Because we know that ARCs are not the finished product, we were curious just how not finished some of them were. The link to the Prezi above will show you some of the responses, but for the curious, here’s a sampling from the over 40 responses we got asking the single question “What were the biggest differences between your ARCs and finished book?” (This, we hope, should illuminate some of the reasons why putting these books in a circulkating library may be a bad idea, among other things).
Note that while we allowed responses to be entirely anonymous, some authors chose to identify themselves. This has been left  — maybe it’ll encourage some exploration of print vs. ARC in and of itself:
  • I make a lot of changes after the ARC is printed, from correcting errors that slip in during typesetting, to tweaking entire passages to improve the writing. For my first YA novel, PROXY (there goes my anonymity!), I actually rewrote the last few paragraphs for a much stronger ending. It didn’t change the story, but changed the quality of the telling and, I hope, the emotional impact of the final page.

  • My ARC went out after copyedits but before proofreading and final changes, so there were still A LOT of mistakes and inconsistencies. Some which I caught, some the proofreader. I always feel a sense of regret when ARCs go out before these changes are made, because reviewers might point out flaws that are fixed in the final novel. But I also understand that with schedules the way they are, it’s difficult to hold the ARC back for these changes without getting out “too late.” It’s a tough one. That warning on the cover, “uncorrected proof” means something.
  • Aside from the grammatical and typesetting errors we caught in the ARC, I opted for the finished book to change the name of the first school my character attended. I had originally used the name of a real Chicago school, citing its gang problem and violence, as relayed to me by a former student and by a parents’ Internet-based watchdog group. However, I felt in the end that I was doing a disservice to the school, and to the teachers and the students and their families, by drawing such negative (though accurate) attention in naming their school. (Leslie Stella, PERMANENT RECORD)

  • I re-arranged an entire scene for timeline continuity in one ARC, and in another changed two names important to later books in the series. The changes were minor details alone, but have huge impact on the overall world-building and timelines of the books.
  • The entire first section–ten poems–of my YA poetry novel were not included in the printed ARC. Reviewers would have had no idea that they were missing anything. It was obvious that some reviewers did not check the finished book before posting reviews. Heartbreaking.
  • Quite a few–the timeline was completely revamped, one character was removed (a minor character, but still), some embarrassing continuity errors were corrected, and the prose was made more sparkly and smooth. I shudder to think of the people who judge the book by its ARC. The ARC gives an idea of the finished product, but it isn’t the finished product by a long shot!
  • I had a book where the publisher sent the very first draft of the book out as the ARC. In the revisions before the final, I changed 45,000 words, removed a subplot, changed the relationships between the secondary characters, renamed people.

  • Sometimes minor, sometimes major.Typos, spelling errors, etc. Proper acknowledgments or dedications might be left out of an ARC. Last-minute content changes can make a difference between an ARC and a finished book, too, not to mention that the overall quality of an ARC is generally less than a for-sale book. I’ve had paragraphs of content that were to be cut, show up in the ARC but not the final version.
It’s our hope that through this presentation and ongoing discussion, it’s clear ARCs have a purpose and a reason behind them. They are not finished copies. They are not meant to be used as a means of currency. They’re instead tools designed to help professionals — be they librarians, teachers, bloggers — engage in professional activities. This can be personal reading; often that personal reading ends up turning into a collection development or reader’s advisory purpose.

On ARCs, Ethics, & Speaking Up

|

I’ve talked this week about how I use ARCs, and the reaction was about what I expected. Most librarians who come in contact with ARCs tend to do similar things. Over the last couple of days, though, the lid’s been lifted on how other people use their ARCs, too.

Before I go on, I’ve pulled up an example of what an ARC looks like, for those who might not be entirely familiar with them. The picture on the left is a good example of what an ARC from a publisher may look like. It’s usually paperback (though there are electronic ARCs too) and each of these ARCs comes with a disclaimer right on the cover — and on the back flap and usually inside, too — that these books are not for sale. That’s not to say they’re not to be shared, but that they’re not meant to be sold. There should be absolutely no monetary exchange with an ARC, either between the publisher and the reviewer, the reviewer and other reviews, or reviewers and, say, teens who may get a copy as a prize during a summer reading club.

Let me repeat: there is no monetary value in ARCs at all at any level. This means that the publisher makes no money off them (and in fact, they’re more costly to produce than a finished copy of a book). Authors make no money off them. Reviewers make no money off them. And they are not, not, not to be sold.

However, they are sold. Regularly.

Hop onto Ebay and do a search for ARC under the “Books” category (or just click here). These things are being sold left and right — some are books that aren’t available yet and they’re truly advanced copies of the book and sometimes, the books have been out and the ARCs are still being sold, often at some really discounted price or because they have a signature or any other number of reasons. It seems after big industry conventions or meetings like ALA or BEA, the number of books making their way onto Ebay increases and a lot of times, they’re books people are really looking forward to or that were perceived as hard-to-get ARCs at the convention. Just this week, I saw an ARC of Bitterblue up on Ebay for a cool $51 (you can pre-order the same book — one that’ll in fact be a finished, complete copy in hard cover and without error — for about $14 right now). That’s not to say that ARCs aren’t sold via Ebay and other similar sites all the time nor that they aren’t sometimes sold in indie bookstores, but the fact becomes more apparent and appalling following these events.

It’s questionable whether selling and buying ARCs is a legal issue, but that’s not what I want to delve into. I want to talk about ethics.

Selling and buying ARCs — when there is money exchanged — is unethical at any and every level.

Now that’s not to say doing an ARC trade or giveaway or donation is unethical. I don’t think it is. There are, in fact, ARC tours meant to help bloggers and librarians get their hands on ARCs to read and review, and the only requirements are time frames for reading and posting a review, as well as paying for shipping of the ARC to the next person in line. The problem emerges when ARCs show up with a price tag attached. When one person puts a price tag on a book that’s clearly an unfinished copy, that clearly has a note on it saying the item is not meant for sale, they’re practicing something that is unethical.

But the blame isn’t just on the person who sells the ARC. It’s also on the person who buys it, especially if it’s someone who knows better than that. It sort of sounds like a no duh moment, but the fact is, it happens, and it’s not as hidden as people think it is. Buying and selling of ARCs is much more common than we like to believe it is.

When someone purchases an ARC, rather than a finished copy of the book, they rob the book of a sale. The author and the publisher and the agent and the editor and everyone else involved in the production of a book sees nothing. The money spent on the ARC goes to the person unethically selling it, rather than to those who worked hard to put together the best finished version of that story.

Something that scares me a little bit about this practice, aside from the unethical nature of it and the fact it takes profit away from those who deserve it for their art, is how easy it is to track down those who are doing it. When I saw the Bitterblue ARC up on Ebay, I was also able to see other ARCs that particular seller had sold, as well as those people who’d purchased ARCs from that seller. One of those who purchased from the seller happened to be a book blogger, whose blog I was able to track down by their user name.  The ease of being able to do that is itself scary, but it’s scarier that the very people working toward promoting reading and books are participating in something they know is unethical.

Let me step back a second and return to a couple earlier points I’ve made here and in my post about how I use ARCs — though it’s not entirely easy to gauge the impact on actually selling copies, my giving the book to a kid doesn’t rob the book of a sale. It’s entirely possible the book is being sold in some way. More importantly, though, I’m not making a profit from giving the book away. No one loses money in this exchange, and there is only opportunity for it to be made (see: purchasing a finished copy for my library to lend).

When a blogger borrows an ARC from another blogger or participates in an ARC tour, they presumably review and build buzz for it. Again, impossible to gauge sales on this, but that’s sort of moot. The blogger isn’t profiting, though, in the exchange and sharing.

But when a blogger buys an ARC, they’re participating in an unethical exchange of cash for goods. They’re not helping spread the word. They’re taking away a potential sale. And when a blogger sells an ARC, they’re profiting from someone else’s work, too.

It sounds extremely hokey to say, but the fact is, books are exciting, and there are times when it feels impossible to wait to read something. When someone unethically lists such a coveted book on a site like Ebay, the temptation to purchase it — especially at what can sometimes be a really, really cheap price — may be huge. If the true goal of blogging, though, is to spread the word about books, to help promote those books worth promoting, to help sell books, the only way to be taken seriously is to behave ethically. That means not only holding off on purchasing an ARC unethically, selling an ARC unethically, and it means doing your part in reporting these things when you see them. It means holding fellow bloggers to a high standard of ethics, and it means calling them out when necessary. It’s a scary idea, to call someone out, but the fact is, people who do these things aren’t necessarily covering their tracks.

You can report these sales via Ebay, and you can forward on these sorts of links on to the marketing folks at relevant pubs.

I don’t have a whole lot more to talk about on the topic, other than to say the value in an ARC is the value in what it does for the book. An ARC and a book aren’t the same thing — the ARC precedes the book, and the ARC can help push sales of the book through early buzz. That’s why they exist and why bloggers have become part of the publicity machine. If you’re truly invested in helping promote books and reading, then you promote the purchase of the book, and you work toward halting the buying and selling of ARCs.

For what it’s worth, bloggers who practice the unethical buying and selling of ARCs are harming, rather than helping, everything that bloggers are working toward doing. They’re tarnishing the image of the role a blogger can play in sales and in promotion and in buzz. They’re also stealing from those who work to produce the content, narrowing, rather than expanding, the experiences the book world can bring.

Anyone curious to learn more about ARCs and the role they play, please take the time to read through Liz Burns’s posts here, here, and here.