All You Need to Know to Start Using Edelweiss

Edelweiss is confusing.

I remember when I first started blogging, I opened an Edelweiss account, and immediately stopped using it because I didn’t know what the hell was going on there. But as time progressed, I realized that Edelweiss usually has more review copies I am interested in, so the only thing I could do is try to figure it out. And I did! Plus, Netgalley limited a lot of their copies for international readers and it’s really stupid, so I had to switch to Edelweiss. So I am here to impart the knowledge I acquired.

Also, a friendly reminder that there’s a GIVEAWAY going on on the blog.

Let’s get to a comprehensive guide to navigating Edelweiss!

When you open Edelweiss, you are confronted with this mess:

It’s kind of daunting. Never fear! We’re gonna break it down!

First things first – your profile

Once you start using Edelweiss for requesting, publishers are going to start looking at your profile. So you need to get it looking all nice and pretty. Your profile is located in the upper right corner of your dashboard:

Once you open up your profile there are two things to look at. I’ve labeled them all in the image below:

The big box is your stats – the same thing you put on your Netgalley profile. I use the same exact text on Edelweiss and on Netgalley. Basically, you should say where you blog, how you review stuff etc. and then proceed on giving stats for all of your profiles – followers, views, visitors, etc.

The smaller box is really important. Those are your profiles connected to the Edelweiss account. This affects your profile strength. And you need that profile strength to be excellent if you want to get approved. So click the little pencil next to the links section and you open up the following dialogue box:

As you can see, I’ve got my Goodreads, Twitter and of course blog links listed. That’s enough to get your profile to excellent strength. Once you’re done, just click the little floppy disk in the bottom right corner to save. And that’s your profile done!

Now the hard part – navigating the site!

The most important (dare I say the only important) tab for you on the site is the Review Copies one:

Once you navigate to it, you can see all of the review copies Edelweiss has available:

Now, you could just scroll through the copies, but that isn’t really time efficient. So you should look to the left side bar and there are a couple of things to consider there and I’ve labeled it different colors:

Review Copy Options

Let’s talk about the middle side bar first.

Available section

Available DRCs are all the digital review copies that are available.
To Download are review copies that you can download right away – no requests or approvals necessary. Sort of like the Read Now option on Netgalley.
To Request is the tab that shows you all the books that are currently up for request on Edelweiss. That is the section that you usually want if you just want to scroll through and see what’s available.

Requests You’ve Made

Now, this is the section where you can see all the books you requested.

Approved – these are all of the copies you request and you got approved for. When you navigate to it it looks like this:

As you can see, it lists all the books you have been approved for. Right now I have 9 books here, because Edelweiss deletes the ones that expire from here, so this section is always fairly clean.

Open – these are request you’ve made that are pending. Those are books that you still haven’t been approved or declined for. The one down side to Edelweiss (except the confusing interface) is that some books can get approved in ten minutes (literally) and some can sit here for months and months. These are mine:

Declined – these are naturally books you’ve been declined for. I only have 2 here, which is so much less than I have on Netgalley. My approved to decline ratio is much bigger here than on Netgalley.

Apply Saved Filter

Now if you remember, at the top of the side bar there’s an Apply Saved Filter section. This can help you narrow down the things you are looking for. This is how the tab looks like:

As you can see, I’ve got 5 saved filters. One are Fantasy books, one is Literary fiction, one is Middle Grade Fantasy, one is my favorite publishers, and the last one is YA. These are books that I usually search for. My most read genres, and a section on my favorite Publishers. Kind of like what you do on Netgalley.

You create the filters yourself, and there are a lot of options. Once you go to Add New Filter, this is what you see:

As you can see, there are multiple stuff to choose from. You can filter by genre (subject), publication date, imprint, publisher (Edelweiss vendor), age group etc.

Once you know what you want, you just click on it and save the filter. Say I want my filter to show me books on family and relationships:

Just click on it, give it a name and then click save. And now you have your brand new filter on the list:

And now you can apply your filter to all of the tabs that you see. For example, if we click on our new tutorial filter, it will show us all Family and Relationship books IN ANY TAB we navigate to. So for example, I apply my filter, and then I navigate to Copies to Request:

As you can see, you can now see which filter you applied in the corner there (it says tutorial) and since we are on the To Request page, it shows us that there are 14 books to request that are related to Family and Relationships. This can be very useful for navigating to stuff you want to see.

If you want to stop applying a filter, you just click on that tab and click Clear:

Refine Results

The last thing in the side bar is the Refine Results option. If you don’t want to use the filter, you can use these categories on the left to navigate to different things. For example, you can look up books that are not yet published, or look up things from a certain publisher:

You just click on the category you want, and Edelweiss shows you all the books in that particular category!

And now you know how to navigate the basic parts of the site!

Next up – Requesting Books

Say you stumbled upon a book you really want to request. How do you do it?

It’s pretty straight forward. Say I want to request The Wicked King by Holly Black:

As you can see, there’s a orange button on the right side, which you can click to request the book! Once you click it, you will see this:

As you can see, in the top right corner there’s the profile strength I was talking about. You want that to say good or excellent.

Below it, you can see your saved profile, with the stuff you put in at the beginning of this tutorial.

And in the bottom there’s a Why are you requesting this title? box. You can put what ever you want here, pour your heart out, beg, cry – whatever you think will work on the publisher to grant you a copy. You can also leave it blank, and it won’t matter much. But sometimes that can be important for getting a copy. I typically put stuff here only if I REALLY want a copy of a book, or it’s a release I am super excited about.

Then you click submit, and the request goes to the publisher while you (im)patiently wait for them to approve it (or decline it).

If you get approved…

If you have a review copy that is approved, you can then download it for your device:

Mine says downloaded because I’ve already downloaded this, but yours will be green and it will say DOWNLOAD on it. If you click that, this is what pops up:

If you’re using Kindle like I am, you can set the first box to Kindle, and in the bottom one you just type your Kindle email, and then the book is delivered to your computer in that format.

If you want to switch this, you can click the Change option in the first red box and you see this:

If you want, you can switch to the standard option, and you get a format that works on the rest of eReaders or your computer etc.

Reviewing a Book

If you’ve read your book and now you need to review it, you navigate to your Review Requests and then to the Approved section. Say I wanted to review What If It’s Us, this is what I would do:

You click the little speech bubble which says Rate and/or Review this Title and this window pops up:

This is your review window!

On the left you can set which things you want to rate. You can give an Overall rating, but you can add all of these other options and rate the book on them as well. For example, there’s Intellectual Depth, or Originality, which can be useful some times.

Below that, there’s a Themes bar. These are sort of like tags on Netgalley, meaning you add little tags that describe the book, and help publishers classify a book.

The blank box on the right is the Review box. Here you past your review, it’s that simple.

Finally, you can define where you Submit your review to. I usually just check the Publisher box.

Then you just click on the floppy disk again to save, and you’re done!

Once you’ve reviewed a book, it will look like this:

The speech bubble won’t be blank but it will instead show your overall rating of the book. It’s that easy. And the book will be moved from the Approved section, and you can instead see it in the Downloaded section, just below the Request section:

And that’s it! 

That’s all you need to know to get started on Edelweiss! I really hope some of you found this helpful and that it will help you navigate Edelweiss better and not be put off by it! Let me know if you use Edelweiss and if you have any questions, ask away!

xxx

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