THE Group for Authors! discussion

Whenever I get a request to review that comes with an offer to send me a PDF of a new novel , I know this is an amateur author who hasn't done his/her homework. The PDF puts the work out to the world and the author loses control as to whom it gets passed on (or copied and republished by some scam site.)

If the author hasn't done her homework, does it also mean that she didn't have her self-published novel edited, revised, restructured, and edited again x40? (That's what it takes me to produce a novel.)

NetGalley and perhaps others offer a digital version that has a time limit--like borrowing a book from a library, then it's gone. It can be a first step for credibility of the author's serious self-published book.

Some authors balk--and rightly so-- at the cost of mailing printed books, but once the initial NetGalley setup is paid, sending the digital link to potential reviewers presents no additional cost.

Just saying.

Thank you so much for this post. I was in real danger of doing this and was wondering how wise it really was.

Then why did I just get a an advanced reviewer copy of a nonfiction book from a publisher as a pdf? Is there something that makes that different?

This advice might change with regard to the type of book you are sending, I write illustrated picture books and do send PDF files for review, however the real value with these books is in the illustrations and I always send significantly reduced quality images which would be extremely hard to use commercially elsewhere. Admittedly It can still be done with determination (not going to tell you how though!) but otherwise for 'amateur authors' like myself it is difficult to get books to people who can help you improve or promote your books for you. I suppose I could add watermarks across every page but that adds to the work getting all the editing and formatting complete for standard publication that you require nowadays. Don't really have a handle on how big a problem this really is, do we have lots of authors complaining that their work is being illegally copied and sold as someone else's work?