A friend of mine who volunteered to read an ARC for Come Back and Haunt Me made a suggestion: Why not do a Traveling ARC?
An ARC, or Advance Reader Copy, is a pre-released paperback meant for early readers who are interested in experiencing your book in exchange for an honest review. In the case of a Traveling ARC, several people read the same paperback copy of your book and eventually it comes back to your friend, who returns it to you.
For instance, I am in New Jersey, and I sent Annette from Florida a paperback ARC, which she read and then passed on to one of her local friends for reading, and afterward, they will pass it to someone else, and so on.
Each person will leave notes in the margins as they read: reactions, thoughts, ideas, criticisms, suggestions, praise. Whatever they like.
After the last reader in the group has finished the book, it will return to my friend Annette, and she will ship it back to me.
How fun is this? I cannot wait to see what readers scribble in the margins.
If these early readers enjoy the book, they can help create buzz for it by recommending it to friends or leaving reviews online. In this way, the Traveling ARC offers a method of spreading your new book around a place in which you don’t live (or many places, if you send out many of them).
Here are guidelines for sending your own Traveling ARC into the world:
+ Create an ARC using KDP or IngramSpark. I don’t have my paperback cover yet, so I used KDP's cover creator to make one. My e-book cover appears on the front, and I simply wrote This is an Advance Reader Copy and the ISBN number and publication date on the back.
KDP is much faster at making ARCs, in my experience, than IngramSpark, whose process is more complicated. However, Ingram’s books are better looking because they do not add the gray band that says “Not for Resale” across the cover the way Amazon does.
+ Once your ARC has been approved, request proof copies and, when you’ve sent them to your Amazon or Ingram cart, replace your address with the address of your reader friend. That way, you don’t have ship the book to yourself and then ship it again to its traveling destination.
+ Sending out the ARC eight or twelve weeks before publication would be ideal (I sent mine out about four weeks prior to publication). The longer the ARC has to circulate, the more readers can read and respond. In my case, I may receive the book after it has published, and that’s fine with me. But if you do it early enough, you could receive the book before it publishes. This could be handy if any of the readers’ notes inspire you to make changes.
+ Once the ARC returns, open it up and see what the readers had to say. They may have pointed out a typo, or maybe they noticed something troublesome about the book that none of your beta readers did, or perhaps they highlighted a beautiful sentence or expressed how surprised they were by a twist. Either way, that feedback will be good to know. Make changes as necessary or simply bask in the praise.
It’s not often that you’re given an intimate peek into readers’ thoughts in a page-by-page way. The traveling ARC provides that much and more.
