Why did we pick two books for February's BRP?
At BetaBooks we've been running a little event called the Beta Reader Pool for the last five months. Essentially, we invite authors to submit books for consideration, and we pick whichever book we feel is the strongest to send out to a group of interested readers.
Normally everything on BetaBooks is private, so this kind of sharing is sort of "outside the norm" for us. However, readers on the site asked for the chance to discover a few new books. We wanted to find a way to offer that to our readers while maintaining a quality standard and without overwhelming them with too many requests to read. Thus, the Beta Reader Pool was born.
Two things have happened in the last five months, which led to us trying something different this round.
1. The reader pool has doubled in size, from about fifty to more than a hundred readers.
2. The number of quality submissions has steadily increased.
As the reader pool has grown we noticed that there was a big, and not surprising, shift among readers from month to month. Depending on what genre we sent out, we had a whole different subset of people accept the invitation to read.
This month the selection team landed on a tie between two very different books, one a sci-fi adventure, and one a YA romance. Both books look great, and Paul and I are guessing that the reader overlap between those two genres is going to be small. Therefore, we decided to try sending out both.
For everyone in the BRP, in a few minutes you'll be receiving two invitations instead of one. As always you're welcome to accept or decline the invitation based on your interest, and you can accept both if you want.
We'll keep an eye on how this goes, and it it looks like it's a nice benefit for readers, and if we have multiple strong candidates from different genres, then we'll consider sending out multiple books again in the future.
Thank you to everyone who submitted for this round, and to all our readers. We hope you enjoy this month's Beta Reader Pool selections!
