Hi all, it’s Super Mod! It’s been a hot minute since I’ve posted, and a while since we talked about the site itself. With so many new members, users, and authors, it seems as good a time as any. I’ve also seen some comments about the site in readers groups that are erroneous, so hopefully this will help. Many of you will already know a lot of this, I apologize for the repetition.
We are a small team of volunteers who love Reverse Harem. The site was begun during the pandemic by an even smaller team. Serenity Ackles, an RH author, wanted to provide some way for RH authors to get their books seen by more readers, and to make it easier for readers to find the RH books they want to read. She enlisted the help of Charlie, web-site creator and friend. That’s it, two people! Both with day jobs, one also writes, and don’t even get me started about both of them having side gigs. By the time they launched the site in August of 2021, there were already thousands of books on the site.
Because we are a small team, because the site is free to use by both readers and authors, and because of other things that are Serenity & Charlie’s areas that I have no idea about, we have to have some limits. So for our purposes, we only include reverse harem here. It is and was always meant to be specific to RH. For us, that means 1 FMC and at least 3 MMCs. Every he/she/they beyond that is icing on the glorious cake that is RH.
While Serenity and Charlie had already arranged some outstanding volunteers, when I became aware of the site, I basically begged to be added to the team. They very graciously said yes. I joined the team towards the end of August 2021 and have never looked back. I love RH, I love all things books, I have deep respect and admiration for Serenity & Charlie, and I love this team and site. Unlike Serenity and Charlie, I am retired, and during the pandemic especially, it was fantastic to have something to occupy me. I’m incredibly introverted, so this is a perfect fit for me.
Here comes a little day-in-the-life of this team, so you can understand a little of what we do. (Serenity & Charlie do so much more than this, but I can only speak to what we volunteers do)
Every day we go through the new releases on our very cool calendar. We use the look inside feature to add tags and TW’s. TW’s and point-of-view are the main things we can normally only get this way. For verified authors, we can only send tag suggestions, just like other site users. Once an author claims their page, we can’t tag, we can’t change blurbs, we can’t change covers, basically, we can add their books and what tags we can get from the blurb (though some of our verified authors do all of this themselves). TW’s are getting tricky because of restrictions in place by some retailers. Because of this, some authors put those warnings at the back of their books. Look inside doesn’t let us see them then. Some authors list theirs on their websites, giving the links in their books. Some say they are on their websites, but alas, they are not there. This is why we have the tag suggestion option for readers. There are some things it’s simply impossible for us to know without reading every book. And that’s just as impossible.
Once those tags are updated, we next search that major book retailer we use for books that need to be added to the site. We use so many search terms, because even though they added polyamory as a category, not all RH books are there. We go through about 75-100 pages of books every day. However, we’re far from perfect, so yes, we miss books sometimes. Again, we rely on the help of readers and authors. There are also books being live released, those are sometimes easiest to miss. Some books just don’t show up under the search terms we use for whatever reason. A couple of times throughout the year, we look up all of our authors to check for any books we’ve missed. That used to be a lot easier, but we now have nearly 3300 authors 😀
There are times we are uncertain if books are RH and should be added to the site. There are numerous reasons for this. Very few authors exclusively write RH. A surprising number of authors call menage RH. Why Choose is a very broad category that doesn’t narrow down our options. Books that are up for preorder don’t always have blurbs, or the blurbs are super vague. Again, this helps authors with the limits placed by retailers. So we shamelessly troll social media, readers groups, authors groups, and websites. We message authors about it where we can, but honestly, authors are busy, and getting a message from a complete stranger, well, who can blame anyone for being careful. Sometimes, we still can’t get the information to make us certain, so we keep a spreadsheet of books that may be RH. Sometimes it’s release day before we can find the information, sometimes even then we can’t tell. Yep, that’s where you all come in again. Go to the bottom of the home page, go to “Have we missed something?” under “Reader Support”, and tell us all about it.
Heck, we keep a spreadsheet for books we’ve added to the site that don’t have blurbs yet. So yes, we check at least some of those daily too. No, we don’t go through the 150-200 books missing blurbs every day, we usually do the current month. But at least once a month we do try to go through all of them. (I do love me a spreadsheet.)
The site communicates with the book retailer and updates if the books have been unpublished, release date changed, and if they’ve changed to KU or non-KU. It originally updated book covers too, but that retailer makes so many changes, it no longer does that. (I’ve noticed it’s the same on Goodreads, which is owned by the retailer!) That makes another thing we need to keep our eyes on. We update some covers pretty much daily, but it’s impossible to keep up with. Sometimes authors announce they are updating covers, but not always. When books are unpublished, authors often put them back up, and we try to keep track of that. Authors also re-publish old books, they change not only covers but blurbs, titles, and series names. Some of these are things that require the big boss, so we send the information to Serenity. (She gets so many messages from just me. Seriously, so very many.) And when you all use the “Have we missed something?”, she is the one who gets ALL of those and takes care of them.
When Serenity adds new tags to the site, not one here or there, but when she does those big batch adds, (I heard a rumor one of those might be happening soon, woohoo!) we go through every active book on the site to add those that apply. Sometimes, you all beat us to it, which is awesome. This gives us another opportunity to check on covers, blurbs, just everything to make sure we have the most up-to-date info available for you all.
So there’s a bit about what goes into this site. Never hesitate to let us know anything we’ve missed, it helps us immensely and is deeply appreciated. Thank you, we’re thrilled you’re here!
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