#NewBloggers 101, Book blogging, Discussion, Edelweiss, NetGalley

How Do I Make A Good Edelweiss Or NetGalley Profile? Part 2 of #NewBloggers 101 post series

Welcome to part 2 of the #NewBloggers 101 post series! Last time, we talked about when you should start requesting ARCs (advance reader copies) at all, and today? We’re going to talk about how to start doing it. So how do you make a good Edelweiss or NetGalley profile? Let’s start at the bottom and make it fun! Short quiz about how much you actually know about requesting books! But before that, if you want to find the other #NewBloggers 101 posts, just expand this list:

Expand List

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The NetGalley and Edelweiss Sorting Hat

  1. Do you know what NetGalley and Edelweiss is?

    • If YES, proceed to next question.
    • If NO…

      NetGalley and Edelweiss are platforms where you can request advance reader copies of books in exchange to your honest review – technically for free (you pay for it with blood, sweat and tears!) It’s where a lot of book bloggers get good as early as a half a year before they come out! Yes, you can join – I suggest clicking those links in the question and simply signing up. NetGalley is fairly simple to navigate, and you shouldn’t have any problems. Edelweiss can be a challenge for some, cause it’s not simply a requesting platform – it’s also a platform where book sellers get books and publishers release their upcoming books catalog! It can be daunting at first, but no worries – we’ve got you covered! At the end of this post I will be redirecting you to resources about how to navigate and understand Edelweiss better.

  2. Have you already tried requesting books?
    • If YES, proceed to the next question.
    • If NO…

      Requesting on both platforms is quite simple. You pick a book you like, you hit the button. In Edelweiss, you can also specify why you want the book or why you’re a good candidate for reviewing it, which can help! I will also be redirecting you to content where this is talked about at the end of this post, don’t worry! What you need to keep in mind when requesting, though, is to not let it get out of hand. NetGalley has a feedback ratio, where publishers can see how many books you’ve read, out of the ones you’ve received. Based on that, they can decide you’re a juvenile delinquent a person who struggles with their responsibilities, and not grant your request! Ideally, you should review or at least give publisher feedback on why you didn’t review for all your books, but 80% is still a very good ratio. You should worry if your ratio is lower than 50%. As for Edelweiss – while it does not have a ratio as such, it’s still not good overloading yourself with books, as you’ll struggle and might even have to join my State of the ARC meme or #ARCsAnonymous group to keep up with your stack. #TheStruggleIsReal

  3. Have you been granted all the requests you want? Are you positively drowning in books?

    • If YES, what are you even doing here?? 😂 you’re a NetGalley / Edelweiss wizard!!!
    • If NO…

      Well, you’ve come to the right place. Cause I’m going to cover the ways you can make your profile reflect that you’re awesomesauce an amazing and responsible blogger who will surely fulfil the publishers’ needs!

So How Do I Bling My Edelweiss And NetGalley Profile?

Throw some glitter on it.

No, but let’s get serious here. While throwing glitter is always awesome, I’m not sure they’ve implemented that the Edelweiss or NetGalley profile systems yet. (I believe it’s only a matter of time though. Don’t you?)

The Main Points Of A Good Profile

Imagine you are a busy publicist. You basically have no time to eat and sleep. And you have to handle all of these book requests, that, honesly, probably just drain the life out of you, cause honestly, there are just so many bloggers, you sometimes just feel the publishing industry is sitting on a huge anthill.

Are you imagining?

Now, consider you’ve just received 76 book requests. (If you’re VERY GOOD at this whole imagining thing, imagine that you’ve received 265.) Your coffee is rapidly cooling, you have a conference call scheduled in about 15 minutes, and you’ve got to look at all of these goddamn requests. What’s the thing you want to see?

Chances are, you’ll want the profile you’re reading to be:

  • relatively short, I don’t need ALL YOUR STATS, holy lord (it is a fact that after seeing about 10 lines of numbers we just stop paying attention)
  • but you still want to see how many followers the blog has
  • social media links are nice, but both NetGalley and Edelweiss have special spots to fill them into, so if the bio repeats them? There’s only so long that coffee is gonna be hot ya’ll
  • however, social media followers don’t take up that much space!
  • the internet is wild, the book you rep is most likely just for one region, so seeing some follower regions couldn’t hurt
  • it would be nice to see what books they typically review (Do you want your scifi book review on a strictly romance blog? Sometimes you do. Sometimes you don’t.)
  • does this blogger run some groups, participate in some street teams? (Guess I should put that on my own, huh…)
  • what makes this blogger special? Do they champion a cause?
  • do they look even remotely professional..? (We like to be fun and whimsy in the book blogging community, but remember, publishers are professionals. The photo with you in cat eats and whiskers is probably not the one you should use.)

The list could go on, but I think this is roughly it. Now, I have heard that a lot of people do not get approved on Edelweiss! For some reason, I get approved on Edelweiss quite a bit..? I have looked at people’s profiles, and found them pretty much the same as mine, with the one key difference – theirs is riddled with links and numbers. Theirs is long. Remember, the person reading your bio is a person. Just like you. If your bio makes your head swim with the numbers, 99% says it’s going to make the publicist’s head swim too!

Now I’m not saying that my profile is perfect! Which is why I’m not going to just give an example of my profile. I’m going to give several bloggers’ profiles as examples!

My NetGalley Profile

netgalley profile

Nicole’s @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction Profile

Nicole has blogged about starting out on NetGalley before and you should also read that post for further info! This here is her NetGalley profile:

Heena’s @ Heena Rathore NetGalley Profile

I hope Heena does not mind me borrowing her profile for a bit, but also, go check out her quite extensive list about what to tweak on your NetGalley profile, which includes putting your email on it (although I’d make sure to remove @ so you don’t get spam botted!):

What About Edelweiss?

The Edelweiss profile has some minor differences. First of all, you should check out Lucy’s @ That Book Gal guide to Edelweiss. She has kindly agreed to help out our #NewBloggers group by posting one! So that should help you figure out the ins and outs of requesting books on Edelweiss, and let me talk about what you should do about your profile.

As for the profile text itself, you can keep it the same as NetGalley! Simple, huh. You will find your profile at the top of the dashboard:edelweiss profile link

And then you just fill it out, copy pasting the text into the text box:

edelweiss profile example

The rest you will do when requesting the book for the first time, and it will save your preferences for the next time! So if you click request (more about that in Lucy’s post), this is what comes up:

edelweiss profile

The two important parts here are the strength of your profile and why you are requesting this title. I’ve explained roughly what you need to write in the ‘why’ part (mostly, it needs to be about why it’s good for the publisher to give you the book rather than why you want it!) As for the profile, if it says anything other than “Excellent”, click on the little pencil symbol beside it. This is what comes up:

profile strength

You’ve already filled out the overview before, so now just head onto the ‘Links’ section and add your social media! (Have you noticed there’s a message at the bottom, saying that you should rather leave links in the links section than in the text? This is what I’ve mentioned before!) And you’re done. Now you can request books.

There now, was this so hard?

(I really tried to find a different GIF. Alas.)

And that should cover you! Now don’t forget to go read Lucy’s post about how to use Edelweiss, as well as the other posts I listed in this guide! If you want to join the #NewBloggers support chat group, just drop me a comment here or a DM on Twitter.


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