The Hoopla With Hoopla

Another blog dedicated to telling you how you can read popular wide author books for FREE and still support us?

Today, we’re going to talk about Hoopla. It’s taken forever for one of my books to get onto the Hoopla system. At the time that I write this, only Winning the Witch is out there. (See picture below and commit it to memory for when you immediately search for my title in Hoopla’s system. Got it? OK.)

If your library system has Hoopla, you can read my steamy, paranormal rom com book for FREE.

You may be asking yourself why you should use Hoopla. Does an author get paid from Hoopla? Is that really supporting authors?

The answer to these questions? Yes. You are supporting authors when you read from ANY library app. We get paid…somehow. When you request your library purchase our books on Libby, we get paid. (Usually around double or triple the list price.)

One author on Wide for the Win’s Facebook page said that, after Amazon, Hoopla was where she earned the second-best payout. We love it!

Hoopla works a bit differently than Libby. We get paid per checkout, and the library can cap how many checkouts they allow per month. For example, you may not find Colleen Hoover’s book in your Hoopla system. That’s because they’re so popular, the limit on checkout could have been reached for the month. Or, your library may already have it on Libby, so they block it on Hoopla to avoid double paying. Libraries have limited budgets, and they can’t pay Colleen Hoover indefinitely.

What do we get paid?

We get about $0.26 per checkout. It can vary, depending on country conversion rate for authors or other factors, but it usually hovers around there.

Nobody said being an author was a get rich quick scheme. But I love the heck out of that $0.26 when it shows up in my dashboard. Don’t take me for ungrateful.

Why do I care about $0.26 when it shows up in my bank account? Here are a few reasons:

#1- It means people are supporting their libraries. There is nothing I love more than libraries. If you don’t use Libby or Hoopla, libraries won’t purchase that software or keep it. It’s your tax dollars at work and probably better use of tax dollars than some of the other stuff your local government comes up with.

#2- People are reading my books. If they like what they read, they recommend it to a friend or leave a review on Goodreads. This triggers that friend (or a Goodreads follower) to either buy my book or give me another $0.26 on Hoopla if they read it there. Every author knows that quarters and pennies add up to real dollars at some point. (Nickels and dimes together are how most authors make their money, to be honest. It’s the work equivalent of hunting for change in your couch and finding enough to pay for your child’s flute rental every month.)

#3- For some reason, seeing a quarter and a penny come through on my publishing dashboard makes me happy. Promo newsletters don’t include Hoopla. You can’t run ads on Hoopla. That means, someone out there has decided to specifically search for my work…or they randomly found me and thought the book sounded good. Those things make me happy.

#4- It’s free for my readers and makes it easy on them. There is nothing I love more than my readers. Love me or hate me, I love you just for reading my book, and I want your reading experience to be easy and enjoyable.

Moral of the story: Yes, we get paid for a Hoopla checkout. We love libraries. We’re just happy you’re not reading our stuff on a pirate site. We get paid. And that $0.26 with several borrows adds up.

Best part? You don’t need to recommend our books to Hoopla like you do with Libby. Hoopla shows up automatically in all Hoopla-using libraries when an author chooses to distribute to Hoopla. (And after it goes through the long approval process at Hoopla. I hope my other books get there soon.) It just conveniently appears in your app when Hoopla is done processing the book.

And support those libraries. Tell your librarians how thankful you are for Hoopla and Libby. A little gushing goes a long way to help authors, and it’s a free way to support us.

Happy reading.