Bards and Sages (Julie) said:
The difference between Book Rooster and NetGalley is that NetGalley pre-screens its reviewers and bloggers for quality control. NetGalley doesn't just accept anyone and everyone. I was a reviewer for a short while. They want to see samples of your reviews. They ask about traffic to your site. They ask about your credentials (publishers can restrict access to their books to certain professionals only). Book Rooster takes anyone and everyone. NetGalley provides you access to known commodities, so to speak. With Book Booster, you are paying for "access" to random people with little or no known ability to construct a complete sentence, let alone write a review.
You would get better results, for free, using LibraryThing or Goodreads.
I disagree - NetGalley, although expensive, is the way to go. They do approve pretty much everyone with a decent blog in my opinion - but if you want a crap-load of book bloggers to get your book, NetGalley is the way to do it. And as a publisher, you get to decide which blogs/reviews get the free download - it's not automatic (it can be, but it doesn't have to be).
I get approved for almost everything I request on NeGalley, but I refuse to read uncorrected proofs, and most of the traditional publishers send their ARC's in a form that is almost undecipherable, so I never even read them.
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Has anyone used this service with success?
http://www.bookrooster.com/for-authors/
It seems like NetGalley but at $67 instead of $399 - obviously it's not as wide reaching as netgalley, but I thought it might be worth a shot.
Have you tried it?
If your book is new adult or young adult romance, it would be worth it to use NetGalley. If it's any other genre, I'm not sure.
If you have a lot of blogger contacts already, you could get the same thing for free by sending out some emails. If you write those genres I mentioned, you could do a targeted tour with one of the bigger NA/YA tour hosts and get 40-50 blogs reviewing your book for $250 and never have to worry about a thing.
EDIT: to say - I saw your Painter series somewhere - with Kathy at I Am A Reader? She's good for reviews. Doesn't she run review tours? She has a huge blogger following.