An advance reader copy (ARC) team is a group of people who have shown an interest in reading your book for the purpose of leaving you a book review. Advance reader copies (ARCs) or review copies, are free books you provide to your ARC team.
BookFunnel Certified Mail allows you to send a private download link to up to 500 members of your ARC team per month. You compose the outgoing message and BookFunnel will email each reviewer a unique link to download the book.
Certified Mail is available on all Mid-List Author plans and above. Learn how to send ARCs on the First-Time Author plan.
What is Certified Mail?
A Certified Mail campaign is crafted by you and sent out from help@bookfunnel.com. You write the body of the email and decide how long the book should be available for your reviewers to download.
You can optionally send a reminder email and an additional follow-up email on the day your book is released.
Customize the download page your reviewers will see and send yourself test emails to see exactly what the campaign, reminder, and follow-up emails will look like. When everything looks good, send the campaign. We’ll take care of the rest!
The email addresses you send Certified Mail campaigns to must be vetted and engaged readers. If they are not, our Certified Mail emails could be marked as spam, which could damage our ability to email everyone. We aren’t a mailing list service, so please don’t use Certified Mail for marketing or to send review copies to strangers on the internet. (Use a download page that collects email addresses, or a restricted page instead!)
Features of Certified Mail
- Each reviewer gets a unique link that can’t be shared online with others.
- The EPUB is watermarked with the reviewer’s identifying information to discourage piracy.
- Customize the book download page with colors that complement your book cover and add headings or additional text to give your review team the information they need.
- Schedule a reminder email so that folks don’t forget to download the book.
- Schedule a follow-up email on release day to everyone who downloaded the book so that they can easily find it on their favorite store and review it.
- Certified Mail comes from our help desk, so reviewers can simply reply to request assistance.
- You receive a summary email after the campaign closes which details which reviewers downloaded the book.
How to Send a Certified Mail Campaign
Click here to learn how to send a Certified mail campaign.
Reminder and Follow-up Email Text
Click here to learn more about reminder and follow-up email customization options.
Certified Mail for One: “Gift a Book”
If you just want one person to get a private download link, you can use our book gifting feature.
Gift a Book includes the watermarking of Certified Mail without the hassle of building a campaign and reminder email. Most authors use this when they are awarding a reader a prize (”You won a copy of Book_Title in our raffle! Enjoy!”) or when they want to send the book to a single reviewer.
FAQ
An Advance Reader Copy (ARC) team is a group of people who have shown an interest in reading your book for the purpose of leaving you a book review. Advance Reader Copies (ARCs), or review copies, are books you provide to your ARC team.
BookFunnel is not a mailing list provider. We have limits to the number of emails we can send per hour just like you do. If we send 20,000 emails on your behalf (or 5000 for you, and 5000 for another author, etc.), we run the risk of our email provider throttling all of our emails, including emails with book attachments.
Readers get furious if their books don’t arrive within 30 seconds. Throttling can (and has) resulted in delays as long as 6 hours. We don’t want to repeat that experience ever again. 🙂
That depends. The email addresses you send Certified Mail campaigns to must be vetted and engaged readers. You can use it to send non-ARC books, but the readers you are sending to must know the email is coming and have opted-in already.
If Certified Mail is reported as spam by an irritated reader, our ability to email everyone can be jeopardized. We aren’t a mailing list service, so please don’t use Certified Mail for marketing.
We have other options for you that are much more flexible! Consider using a download page that collects email addresses, or even a restricted page instead!
Yes, you can add one or more email addresses to a campaign that has been sent. Learn how to do this here.
You can use an email signup page and send it to new reviewers as you find them. If you have Integration on your account, you might also use a restricted page. Compare Certified Mail and Restricted Pages.
If you prefer to email your readers directly, we have ways to make that happen! You can still track who is downloading your book and trust that the files are watermarked if you use either:
- An email signup page that collects email addresses, or
- A restricted page that checks an email address against your mailing list before a reader can download the book.