Potential Increase in Listing Fee

I’d like to discuss a potential adjustment to our book listing fee and gather your valuable feedback. As you know, Get Books Reviewed thrives on a balanced token economy that allows authors to connect with reviewers and gain valuable reviews.

Currently, authors earn tokens by reviewing other members’ books, which they can then use to list their own books in our public library for reviewers to discover. We also offer a special benefit to our new members during their trial period: the ability to list their first book for free, without needing to accrue tokens through reviews first.

However, we’ve noticed that the number of free first listings for new members is putting a strain on our token economy. To maintain a healthy balance and continue offering this valuable introductory benefit, we are considering increasing the listing fee for subsequent book listings. We estimate that the fee may need to at least doubled from 150 to 300 tokens, if not more, to offset the tokens provided through these free first listings. On a positive note, this is happening because we’re taking on more new members (AKA: new reviewers for your book(s)) than we ever have before.

The core reason for this potential increase is to prevent token inflation. When a significant number of free tokens are distributed, the value of earned tokens can be diluted. A higher listing fee helps us maintain the value of the tokens you earn through your thoughtful reviews, ensuring a sustainable and rewarding system for everyone.

This leads us to a crucial question for our community: How valuable was it for you to have your first book listed for free when you joined GetBucksReviewed?

We understand that the free first listing can be a significant incentive for new members to join and experience the platform firsthand. It allows authors to see the system in action and potentially receive their first reviews without the initial time investment of reviewing others.

However, we also want to consider an alternative: Would you have been willing to invest the time to review other authors’ books first to earn the tokens needed to list your own book?

If the free first listing wasn’t a critical factor for many of you, we could potentially maintain the current listing fee. This would mean that all members, including new ones, would need to earn tokens through reviews before listing their books. While this might mean some new members take a little longer to list their first book, and some potential members may never sign up, it would help us avoid increasing the listing fee for everyone.

We recognize that both approaches have potential benefits and drawbacks. Offering a free first listing can attract more new members initially, but it necessitates a higher listing fee down the line. Requiring new members to earn tokens first might result in slower growth and a weaker overall community, but could maintain a lower listing fee for all members in the long run.

Other Reasons We Use/Need the Listing Fee

I realize a lot of people don’t like the idea of increasing the listing fee because they don’t feel it benefits them directly (though it does via new reviewers, lower cost token bonuses, and reviews more often). We also use gift tokens as a type of insurance for:

• Returning tokens to authors if a review gets taken down from Amazon.
  • This happens when someone gets themselves banned on Amazon for using multiple review services at the same time. Often, the reviewer will not have enough tokens to cover all the returns.
  • On rare occasions, Amazon seems to randomly take down reviews for no logical reason.
• Returning tokens to the author and letting the reviewer keep at least some of the tokens when a book was supposed to be a verified review, but did not show up as a verified review, even though the reviewer showed us a receipt of their purchase.
  • This does not happen often, but when it does happen, it’s not the reviewer’s fault, as they did everything correctly, but Amazon did not put the Verified Review on the book. Also, a non-verified review is not what the Author requested, so we want to be fair there too.

If we keep the token fee low, we will be limited on how we can help in situations like this, where we want to be courteous and limit pain points for both reviewers and authors. If we don’t have enough reserve tokens, we won’t be able to offer these insurances, which could affect you down the road.

Your feedback is incredibly important to us as we consider the best path forward for GBR. We want to ensure a fair and sustainable system that benefits all members.

Here are the results of our poll:

After considering feedback from our members, we have decided to require new members to submit a book review before they can list their first book. Also, we’re only going to increase the listing fee to 175 instead of 300 to help balance the token economy without putting too much of a burden on members who have a lot of books.

Sincerely,
Benjamin – GBR Owner