Do You Need Book Reviews?

We can't guarantee numbers — but here's what our beta testing showed: review rates ranged from 44% to 64% of sign-ups actually leaving a review. For comparison, industry average for cold-outreach ARC campaigns is usually cited around 10–20%. Even our lowest-performing test campaign had 72 readers, which was still more than enough to hit strong results. Our best campaigns saw hundreds of sign-ups, with a few outliers pulling in thousands of interested readers. We will update stats here when we get any changes.

No — and we never will. We don't guarantee star ratings, review counts, or what readers will say. Our readers review honestly, not to order. What we do guarantee is a genuinely engaged pool and a system built to give your book the best possible shot. And that we will always try our best to ensure you walk away as happy as we can get you.

Yes. We support both pre-release ARCs and review campaigns for already-published books. One thing to flag: if your live book is in Kindle Unlimited, you'll need to pull it out of KU for the duration of the campaign to stay within Amazon's terms — that part's down to you to manage.

Each campaign has just 1–3 ARC spots, and we only run 4 campaigns a month — one per week average. With hundreds of authors in the Hive, spots go fast and are first come, first served.

For £50 (our launch price — it will rise, so this is the cheapest it'll ever be), we'll:

• Put your book in front of our ARC reader pool, sourced from our mailing list and website traffic

• Actively nudge readers to follow through on reading and reviewing

• Keep our reader list trimmed on our chosen ARC platform, so readers who consistently don't review don't get invited back

• Handle the chasing and admin so you don't have to

We're currently only taking bookings for 2026 and will add 2027 soon, to make sure nobody misses their window.

• Pay & pick your date — Choose your preferred campaign date from the availability list below, and then state it in the notes section when you pay via PayPal.

• We confirm via email — We'll email you within about a week to confirm your slot and the date your campaign will go out. You need to mark theindieauthorhive@gmail.com as NOT spam. Or else you may miss an email.

• You send us your book — At that point, we'll need either your EPUB file, or a date by which you'll send it to us. We promise not to share it with anyone unauthorised, or use it in any manner that would break your copyright. We simply upload it to booksprout, and offer that reading link to our audience.

• Tell us your platform priority — Let us know which platform(s) you most want reviews on (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.) so we can steer readers accordingly.

• We handle the rest — We upload your book to Booksprout, get it in front of our reader pool, and chase readers to follow through.