Top 5 Peeves I Have with NetGalley

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Overall, I do enjoy NetGalley as a service but there are just a few things that bother me about it.

#1 Sequels

I think NetGalley should have a more obvious marker for books that are part of a series. When a publisher doesn’t mark that it’s book #2 or #3, or mention that it’s a sequel, it makes it a little hard to review on time.

#2 Location Locking

It’s the modern age. You know where I am. Why bother showing me things I can’t request?

#3 Timely Approvals

I think there should be a time period before the archive date when reviewers can A: no longer request and B: automatically be declined if they haven’t been already. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been a approved for a title the day before it archives. Which means I have to read the book quickly (along with everything else I have to read) and get the review up or let my feedback rating fall.

#4 Wishes

Are dumb. Either the book is available for request or it isn’t. The end. Don’t make us wish that you uploaded a damn file.

#5 No Choice of Format

I love graphic novels. I hate Adobe Editions. As does my computer. It runs slow on each device I have it on and takes too long to load pages. Do you know how hard it is to read anything when you have to slowly watch each page load? My kindle supports graphic novels, Nooks, to my knowledge, support graphic novels. I would prefer having a choice of format so I can choose to read it on my kindle in black and white or deal with the slow loading in Adobe.

#6 No Mobile App

I don’t want to read the books on my phone, I can do that in the kindle app. But I would prefer a NetGalley mobile app that I can request through and get notifications from. Yes, we receive emails when we’ve been approved or denied but they get lost in a sea of emails. It would be nice to have reminders as well for when a book is about to archive and I have not added my review to NetGalley.

By J. M. Tuckerman

J.M.Tuckerman is a neurodivergent writer with a big education. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, an MA in Writing, and a BA in Writing Arts (specializing in Creative Writing, New Media Writing, and Publication; concentrating in New Media Production), which she somehow managed to earn despite her three very loud and large dogs. Jessica was lucky enough to intern at Quirk Books and Picador, USA while earning her master’s degrees. Her service dog, Ringo, is very proud of all that she has accomplished and hopes to be on a back cover of a published book with her very soon. An avid reader, writer, and lover of young adult and middle-grade literature, Jessica’s bookshelf is overflowing with hardbacks, paperbacks, and a million half-filled notebooks. She is a proud fur-mommy to two lab/st-bernard littermates, a retriever-mix service dog, and one orange little hobgoblin cat, all of whom have made very audible appearances on the Booked All Night podcast.

14 comments

  1. Awesome post! I agree with many of these. I’ll also add, I’d like the ability to unrequest. There are a few that have been pending for so long that I no longer want them!

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  2. About the archive thing… how about you simply download the book before the archive date and then just read it whenever you find the time? You can still review a book after it’s archive date (as long as you’ve downloaded it before that), I do it all the time 😊

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      2. Yeah… Which is why it’s such a peeve when that happens. If I forget to add a review – that’s on me. But when I get a late approval – that’s not fair that I get punished. Especially since I request MONTHS in advance. I’m always looking out 3-4 months so that I have time.

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  3. I think one that would make my list is that you can’t remove/delete your request. Only for the reason that I have a ton of books in “pending” that were released forever ago and I’m clearly not going to get. I find it really annoying to see them sitting there (forever probably) and that I can’t just remove them! Or at least just have them auto-decline them after a cutoff date.

    And I also completely agree with the sequels thing. I mean, I guess it’s not too hard to look it up on Goodreads (which I usually do just to be safe) but I know edelweiss shows the sequels and other works. It’s not hard for them to just add that somewhere on here like “Oh hey, this is Book 3 in the series btw”

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  4. Totally agreed on a lot of these. I got so excited to see a book I’ve been fangirling so hard over for months on there the other day, rushed to go request it, only to find it’s for people in the UK only with no U. S. one in site. Why bother showing up then? XD And wishes always crack me up. Wonderful post! ❤

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  5. There’s a book I requested almost a year ago now that hasn’t been accepted or declined and I asked for it in the prime window when they should be checking for requests. The publishers literally just have to press an accept or decline button.
    I got approved for a book, was 30% through when I realized it was the third in a series 🙄 I lived the series but if I hadn’t I would have been so mad.
    My tbr would be infinite I’d they had an app. Which is why I need it 😂

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    1. Right? And as for the publisher side, they get thousands of requests, I went through them at my internship it’s a never ending feat. Which is why I think they should have a window to stop reviews or deny or accept all remaining. At the very least if the book archived and we weren’t approved or declined it shouldn’t count toward our rating

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