What is NetGalley?

A while a go one of the authors I follow on facebook posted about this new (to me) site for ARC (advanced reader copy) and other books to review.  As I was intrigued by the books offered I decided to give it a try. 

The sign up process was not hard or too complicated. I chose 2 books and waited to see if I would be chosen to read them.  About a week later I got this email from NetGalley - 

Request notification from Thomas Nelson--FICTION.

Thomas Nelson Fiction appreciates your interest in our books and respectfully requests that you wait to publish reviews until 30 days prior to the book's release date. We'd love for you to send us a link to finished reviews. Thanks so much for your interest! Please understand we will only approve you for one book at a time until you post a review. Follow us on Twitter @nelsonfiction Find us on Facebook. Thomas Nelson Fiction

The Curiosity Keeper: https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/show/id/61772


I was approved!! Yay! I was very excited to start reviewing books again. I had gotten frustrated with the process of paper books, as I mainly read on my devices now.

Little did I know that the process of getting this book onto my device would prove a mild frustration... and I cannot lay blame on any 1 thing, I believe it is a combination of things.


I dutifully clicked on the link for the book, signed in and followed all of NetGalley's clear instructions on getting the book into my reader. After finding that I had entered the wrong kindle email address for my device and repairing that, I found no matter how many times I clicked "send to device" I did not see my book there for review. I even went so far as to email Amazon about the problem... and they could not get back to me right away by email, I did not feel this was urgent enough for a phone call. So, I waited and checked my email in the morning. (Suffice to say patience is still being learned by me...) Lo, and behold I saw an email from Amazon in the morning and after checking my Kindle reader app, I say 3 copies of "The Curiosity Keeper" in my library list! Oops. I guess the instructions did work. Patience is a good thing to practice.

Now I was ready to read!

To read my review of "The Curiosity Keeper" please click here.


The book itself did not translate well into Kindle reader. There were capitalization errors (for every sentence!) and spacing problems as well as line problems (no spaces between paragraphs and such). This did make it harder (not impossible) to read.


I would suggest to NetGalley to make sure their ARCs are actually readable in the format presented. As writing a good review relies upon being able to read and enjoy the book.