What Is an ARC?

An ARC, an advance reader copy, is a copy of an unpublished book sent out before publication so that people can read it early. It is a genuinely old arrangement and one of the least regulated parts of publishing, which explains both how useful it is to readers and how much confusion surrounds it.

Why publishers send them

Three reasons, and they are not equally important.

Reviews. A book published on a Tuesday has a launch moment lasting about seventy-two hours. A review posted a fortnight earlier does real work during that window. This is the commercial reason and the one publishers care about most.

Backlist. A debut author may have no platform at all. ARCs from bloggers and podcast hosts can be the entire initial audience, and for a title without a marketing budget they frequently are.

Fit. A book sent to twenty carefully chosen readers is being tested against a specific audience. If the wrong books come back, the publisher learns something about positioning that no internal debate would have surfaced.

Who receives them

Mostly established reviewers: book bloggers with a following, BookTok and Bookstagram accounts, podcast hosts, and the long tail of the review ecosystem. A title from an established name is also sent to booksellers, because shelf presence at publication is bought with advance copies.

What an ARC copy actually is

Three versions exist and readers rarely know which they have.

• The final ARC is typeset to the published edition. What you read is what will be published, and an honest review describes that book.
• The advance manuscript is not typeset at all. It may be missing front matter, may have placeholder images, and the publisher may still be changing it while you read. Reviewing it as though it were finished is unfair to everyone.
• The digital ARC is usually an ePub or PDF with a watermark naming the recipient. Most are time-limited and often expire before publication.

What is expected of you

The unwritten rules are short, and they are the norm rather than a contract, which is worth being clear about.

• Review it on your own schedule, but do review it. An unreviewed ARC wastes the copy the publisher spent.
• Be honest. The near-universal convention is that an author receiving their own ARC may read the review, and that the reader did not know the author was reading. This is why a five-star ARC review is the most heavily discounted genre of book review, and why discounting it is your own interest.
• Disclose. Saying you received a copy is the whole mechanism. It costs one sentence.
• No review required. If you did not finish it, nothing happens. Nobody is owed a review by a stranger's gift.

The part worth saying plainly

There is no purchase requirement, no obligation to post on a particular day, and no consequence for not reviewing. If a message promising a free review in exchange for a five-star rating reaches you, that is not the publishing industry's arrangement. It is a scheme, and it is worth deleting rather than acting on.