The ARC playbook by genre

Most ARC advice is written as though every book launches the same way. It doesn't. A romance campaign is a volume operation aimed at launch-week velocity; a business-book campaign is a credibility operation aimed at fifteen of the right people. Running the second like the first is how authors end up with two hundred reviews that do nothing for them, or eleven that do everything.

Here's the version by category.

Target counts are working benchmarks from how campaigns in each category are typically run, not measured averages. Channel recommendations reflect each platform's stated audienceNetGalleyBookSirens and one cross-platform campaign reportIllene.

Romance and romantasy

This is the category where volume genuinely works. Readers move quickly, consume in series, and are comfortable with the ARC convention — the documented campaign that produced 311 reviews from 520 downloads was a romantasy launch, and it ran its window in six weeks.Illene

Optimise for launch-week velocity. Use two or three consumer platforms simultaneously rather than one, list early, and enforce the deadline tightly. The target of 50–100+ isn't vanity: in a category this crowded, review count is one of the few signals a browsing reader can use, and the Spiegel curve's steepest gains have long since been captured by every competing title on the page.Spiegel

Science fiction and fantasy

Longer books, slower readers, and a review culture that engages critically with worldbuilding and internal consistency. Give the campaign three to four months rather than six weeks — see the timeline by genre for how to structure that without losing everyone to the middle-of-window slump.

Expect fewer reviews and better ones. A thoughtful 800-word SFF review does work that ten "loved it!!" ratings don't, and this audience will notice continuity errors that slipped past your editor — which is uncomfortable and also free developmental feedback before the book is locked.

Nonfiction and business

Here the whole model inverts. You are not running a volume campaign; you're running a credibility campaign, and the deliverable is often a blurb rather than a star rating.

The economics support this. A survey reaching 350 authors found that 64% of business books showed a gross profit, and that speaking, consulting, and workshops generated much more income than book sales and royalties did.Book ROI studyBernoff If the payoff is positioning rather than unit sales, then fifteen reviews from people your buyers recognise beat two hundred from strangers.

Practically: build a target list of named people before you build a reader pool. Send personally. Accept that your response rate will be low and your conversion, among those who respond, will be high.

Memoir

Memoir is the category where reader mismatch does the most damage. The subject matter is personal and the response to it is personal, so a reader who requested on a whim and finds the content heavier than expected doesn't just fail to finish — they sometimes post a review that's really about the mismatch rather than the book.

Screen for thematic fit before approving, and say clearly in the ARC listing what the book deals with. Content notes aren't a liability here; they're reader-matching, and they raise completion by keeping the wrong readers out.

Children's and middle grade

The reader isn't the reviewer. Parents, teachers, librarians, and booksellers are the ones who post, recommend, and — critically — buy in quantity. That reorients the whole campaign toward the trade and education channels rather than consumer review platforms, and it stretches the timeline to 60–90 days because you're working around a school calendar.

This is one of the few indie categories where a trade-facing platform earns its cost, because a single library-system selector is worth more than a hundred consumer ratings.Above the Treeline

What doesn't change

Three things hold across every category:

• Your own list beats strangers. On the same platform, in the same campaign, invited readers reviewed at 93% against 72% for organic requesters.Illene That gap doesn't care what genre you write.
• A deadline and two reminders do more than any other single intervention.
• Reader history compounds. Whatever your target count, hitting it gets easier every launch if you keep a record of who delivered — and impossible to improve if you don't.

That last one is the thread through all of these. A romance author needs to know which of 200 readers to re-invite; a nonfiction author needs to remember which fifteen names said yes last time. Same problem, different scale — and it's what a permanent reviewer CRM and reliability scoring are for.

Next: how the platforms compare on cost and completion and the mistakes that quietly kill a campaign.