Booksprout Review

Booksprout is a website that offers to get you book reviews by exposing your work to their community of over 80,000 active reviewers. The gist of Booksprout is that you pay them for access to their reviewers, to whom you provide a free copy of your work in exchange for an honest review.

They have several pricing plans, and I chose $9.00 USD per month, which was the cheapest option. This was my first mistake. I found their directions and user interface unintuitive, and set up what I thought was a two-month campaign for July and August 2024, to garner advance reading copy (ARC) reviews for my fantasy novel Plea to a Frozen God.

I didn't pay enough attention to Booksprout's billing details, and I paid for my carelessness. My bad, but I'm here to help you not make the same mistake. I didn't actually sign up for a two-month campaign, rather a monthly fee that would be charged until I cancelled my account. Needless to say, after my campaign ended and I was still invoiced by Booksprout, I cancelled my account. They did promptly refund me my final month's payment, which was very courteous and professional of them. 

What was my return on investment for my $27.00 USD? Two reviews, and very expensive ones, at that!

Anyhow, this was an unsuccessful venture for me. Hopefully I learned a lesson about reading all the details closely before paying for services. Book marketing is hard enough without the confusion.