Thank you NetGalley and We Are Bookish for creating this awesome resource to understand expectations for reviewing books and becoming a strong book advocate. This toolkit has practical tips both to get started and stay engaged. It’s really helpful!

This was AWESOME! I wish I had this when I first started my bookstagram account! Downloading canva now! Thanks netgalley!

This contains fabulous tips and tricks for this (relatively) new bookstagrammer. I truly appreciate the help in formulating my opinions in a concise and impactful way. If only I had a primer like this in the early days, I might not be still playing catch-up with the elusive 80% ratio.
Thank you!
Michelle Beckwith

This is amazing! Absolutely love how comprehensive this toolkit is! and the suggestions are so helpful! Thank. you so much Netgalley!

What a great and useful book from We Are Bookish for starting and continuing online blogs and Instagram accounts! It totally made me re-think how I am using bookstagram and I will be using some of these tips.
Follow me at @read.with.tae for more on Instagram!

Whether you are new to NetGalley (like me) or an experienced user who is trying to maximize their experience on the site, this is a wonderful resource for anyone who uses NetGalley. It had tons of helpful tips on how to navigate the site, to write book reviews, to run a bookish social media, and to strategize bookish content. This guide is highly recommended for anyone looking to take their NetGalley account to the next level, and I know that I will be referring to it often! Thank you to NetGalley team for publishing this super helpful resource.

This was a super helpful toolkit to help you navigate Netgalley. It has tips and tricks for writing reviews, using social media, and book blogging. I myself am confident using LibraryThing, StoryGraph, GoodReads, Facebook, and Twitter but this guide will help me branch out more on Instagram and a book blog.

Thanks for the tips. :)

Title:: NetGalley's Book Advocate Toolkit
Written:: by We Are Bookish
Pub Date:: 08 Mar 2022

This is a small booklet full of tips to get your NetGalley reviews into shape.

I found out one or too thinks I didn't know or think of. Though I have been review books for years on NetGalley this toolkit really gave me some things to think about. Particularly how I approach my reviews.

Great summary for book bloggers or booktuber when starting out. Thank you netgalley for providing this copy!

This is super helpful for those of us who, like me, started a Bookstagram on a whim and now want to pursue it more seriously. I read this digitally on my computer, but now I really want to print it out and keep it for referencing! Thank you all for for collecting and giving a starting point for reviewing the books we all love!

What a helpful guide for book reviewers. It is absolutely full of great tips for new and established people in the book business for fun or profit. The toolkit includes do's and dont's for every media platform including Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and many more. There are step-by-step instructions for creating the very best NetGalley profile to impress publishers.

I appreciate having the opportunity to read this informative book. I learned about other media platforms I am interested in exploring. I would enjoy a more in-depth version of this book. I feel it would be helpful to educate reviewers on a higher level than this book offered.

Thank you NetGalley and We Are Bookish, for sharing NetGalley's Book Advocate Toolkit. I will be using this new information to improve my reviews.

This is a fantastic resource for people who are wanting to start reviewing DRCs via netgalley and who are looking into reviewing books on social media platforms.

This toolkit assists book advocates on how to decide which platform is right for them by giving a brief overview of each platform.

It also explains how to start using netgalley and includes the great tip of not going click happy as soon as you create a netgalley account. Just for that fact alone, I wish this toolkit was around when I joined about a year ago lol.
It assists with tips on what to put on your profile and how to keep your ratio up and why it's important.

Netgalley has said this kit will be updated and will be a "living" document and that they are looking for feedback.

My feedback:

Give some examples of what you mean by social media platform stats. The audience for this document is mostly new users of netgalley and likely bookish media. So the audience might not know what the "stats" entail and which ones are important to publishers when looking for a good advocate for their DRC.

I'm a visual learner, as are many others, and so an example of a made up profile and what that would entail might be helpful to include.

When I first joined,I didn't know about archive dates and lost out on reading and reviewing a book because I didn't download it in time. It would be helpful to discuss the publish date versus the archive date and a reminder that the archive date could be prior to when the book is actually released, so it is important to download the book soon after you've been approved.

I think it would also be helpful to do a quick blurb on how to find your kindle email to connect it to your account. (Pictures would probably be the quickest way for people to understand). It took me a bit of googling and trying to find it before I was successful when I set up my account.

All in all, this is a great start to the document and a good reference to even those of us who have been on here for a while as it's got some good tips for how to write a solid review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4/5)

Overall, 4 stars since there is room for improvement. It is definitely a great start to a very helpful document! Thanks for the wonderful resource. Netgalley!

This was a really helpful free resource and I'll definitely be referring back to it in the future. Thanks, NetGalley!

This is a comprehensive guide to succeeding on NetGalley and scoring your most-wanted e-ARCs. I have been using NetGalley for several years now, but I'll be honest that I haven't really had a clue what I was doing. I would get tips and tricks here and there, but it's nice to have a complete guide to refer back to when I need an extra boost in the game. This will be super helpful for reviewers.

Lots of useful tips especially for those starting out. I liked that it showed some free tools e.g. canva for editing photos etc for social media.

NetGalley's Book Advocate Toolkit is a great resource for all beginning and experienced book reviewers! The Toolkit includes tips on getting started with your preferred reviewing platform (blog, Instagram, TikTok, or Youtube) and suggestions on creating content. I highly recommend downloading and reading this resource!

What a great resource for NetGalley users. I think anyone can benefit from reading this, whether you're new to NetGalley or you have been a reviewer for a while. I will definitely keep this book to look back on as needed.

NetGalley’s Book Advocate Toolkit is a necessary publication that assists newcomers and veteran book lovers’ information needed to promote the advanced reader’s copies they receive from NetGalley.
In 2016, I joined NetGalley. I was so excited because I always had a love of the written word, and would spend hours reading my favorite romance and mystery stories. But I didn’t know how to get the word out about the books I loved. Someone told me that I should start a blog. I didn’t know how to do it, and reading a book or two about it didn’t help. Now, I’m growing my social media presence through assistance from articles I found on We Are Bookish.
I believe this publication can and will assist newcomers to the world of book social media promotion, and how to write book reviews. I also believe that it can help veteran NetGalley users as a refresher course on what they need to remember when using NetGalley and social media with advanced reader’s copies. Further, I believe that this work should be expanded and used for all new NetGalley users to understand how to succeed in building a social media presence as a book influencer.

NetGalley’s Book Advocate Toolkit is an engagingly presented 30-page guide on how to use NetGalley and the various social media platforms to help promote ARCs (Advance Review/Reader Copy).
It’s available as Read Now for NetGalley members - for those who don’t know, NG is a site which allows keen book reviewers to receive free books, often ahead of publication, with the expectation that they will provide a written review and post it to Amazon, GoodReads and other social media sites. This easy to read guide would certainly have been most useful at the start of my NetGalley journey, but I think there are useful tips for everyone, given the ever-expanding number of places that bookworms can visit to rave, rant, read about or recommend books.

I first joined NetGalley in 2016, prompted by a mention in a favourite author’s newsletter that it was a way to get hold of her latest book months ahead of publication. I had been cataloguing my books and writing brief reviews on GoodReads since 2011, and before that on Visual Bookshelf, but this was very much for me, rather than any expectation that anyone else would be interested in my opinions. I was declined by the author’s publisher and so didn’t bother trying again for a year or so, until I received an email with a widget (= digital link to to relevant page to be able to download the book directly) for the latest from another favourite author, which piqued my interest enough to figure out how it all worked.
At the time I was studying for a postgraduate diploma which taught me how to write structured essays and criticise papers, so I started using the same techniques to write detailed reviews on GoodReads. 361 approvals later, I’ve got a feedback ratio of 97%, and last year 72 out of my 162 books read last year were NG ARCs - which is less than the previous year as I am becoming more selective over time.

I liked the way this was laid out, with short snappy tips and links to more in-depth articles on NG’s bookish.netgalley.com page. I had already read most of the articles, as I’m always on the lookout for advice on improving the quality of my reviews and get their newsletter, but it doesn’t hurt to go back to them as the reviewing landscape is constantly evolving. The sections on how to set up your profile and how to write a review will be of most use to newbies - in fact it should be considered essential reading for newcomers to the site - but I even seasoned reviewers could find useful nuggets in there. I laughed when I saw “avoid the request spree” - doesn’t everyone get carried away when they start out and end up with too many deadlines? It took me a couple of years to rein in those tendencies and realise that I didn’t have to request everything - I would of course be able to buy the book later and read it at leisure. Having a list of overdue books - often because I’d receive a book from a series I’d heard of but haven’t started so feel compelled to catch up with the earlier instalments first - got really stressful. I have enough of that in my day job without feeling that my hobby had become unpaid work.

The blurb for this indicates that it is a living document that will be updated over time, and that they are actively seeking feedback. With this in mind, my additions would be:
don’t take declines personally! I’m in a couple of NetGalley Reviewer Facebook groups and members are constantly bemoaning the fact that certain publishers keep turning them down. I used to be the same, not helped by the emails which give you a broad list of possible reasons but don’t specify which apply in your case. Over time I’ve accepted that it’s probably because I’m not a blogger and live in the wrong country for the publishers I’m most interested in.
write your review as soon as possible after finishing the book, and certainly before starting your next read: it can be helpful to let your thoughts marinate overnight, but if you leave it too long you risk forgetting important details and the emotions associated with the story or characters and having a pile of reviews to write will start to feel like homework.
use Notes or Word to compose your review then copy & paste into all the relevant sites: the number of times I’ve lost half an hour’s worth of review because the GoodReads app shut down taught me that it’s much less frustrating to write them somewhere that saves as you go along.

always download books immediately - if you haven’t sent them to your kindle account by the time they archive, you’ll lose them. Also be aware that books in the Adobe Digital Editions disappear after 90 days whether you’ve read them or not.

if you decide that a book you have been approved for is not for you, there is an option to notify the publisher that you won’t be reading it, and give a reason (in my case discovering that it contains scenes of animal abuse) but use this feature sparingly as they do affect your feedback ratio forever.

don’t get obsessed with orange pencils and auto-approvals - they’re a nice compliment but don’t appear to have any impact on future approvals by other publishers.

read as many reviews as you can by the most popular people on GoodReads to see what works and what you like, then adapt your own style. Personally I’m not a fan of gifs and ranty diatribes, but they sure get a lot of likes!
make sure your GoodReads profile is Public. An online friend who works for a publisher recently posted that requests from people with profiles set to private will automatically be declined, which makes a lot of sense. Use a pseudonym and a separate email if you don’t want people you know finding out just how much time you spend reading 😹

The second half of the toolkit, and the part which was most useful to me, was all about the various Social Media platforms and how to use them. I find this area frankly overwhelming: I did start a Bookstagram https://www.instagram.com/thecatsmothersbooks/ separate from my personal account (which I don’t look at much TBH and mostly use for posting cat photos - for all its faults I still prefer Facebook, but rarely use it to post reviews) and initially created a few posts (mostly pictures of cats with books haha) but lack the time, energy and artistic skills to create the beautiful posts that most people go for - I prefer words to pictures. I’d possibly be interested in contributing to a blog run by someone else, but don’t have the knowledge or technical ability to create one, and since I rarely look at them myself, don’t really see the point. I get that this is what publishers want to see, but it feels like a very overcrowded market already. I have a Twitter account but don’t use it because I don’t understand it at all, and have no interest in viewing or creating videos so will be staying well away from Booktube and Booktok. I’ve never really got the hang of hashtags so the page explaining these was helpful.
I think it would be easy to get the impression that you’re expected to have a profile on all of these platforms - this is not the case! While I want to do my bit for authors and publishers, I’d rather be reading - I don’t mind spending an hour crafting a review and posting it to NG, GoodReads and Amazon as a minimum, but anything more is reserved for books I loved or authors I have a direct relationship with.

Overall I found this a helpful guide which I will continue to refer to and would recommend to anyone who uses NetGalley, but especially for beginners.

Helpful collection of tips on how to use NetGalley and your platforms! Thanks to NetGalley for providing it!