We’ve been testing and watching the efforts of Bookbub.com lately and are pleased to report that as readers, we love the service. Better still, we’ve heard from a few authors who are also loving the promotional vehicle and — though unsubstantiated by us at this moment — claim to have sold “thousands of books” with the site’s targeted e-newsletters.
What Is It?
BookBub is a daily email that features limited-time discounts on ebooks. More than 1 million people with tablets and ereaders have signed up for BookBub to learn about price promotions on acclaimed ebooks that match their interests.
Publishers and authors pay to promote their limited-time ebook discounts to their audience. Bookbub can advertise promotions running at any retailer including Amazon’s Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Play, Kobo, Smashwords, and others.
Like other daily emails, BookBub is an “advertorial” newsletter. This means that although the email consists of paid advertisement listings, they have an editorial team that approves only the listings they think are the best deals for subscribers.
Why Offer Deals?
Every day, many authors and publishers temporarily discount their digital books or give them away for free. Some of their most common goals include:
- Helping an author get more exposure and reviews
- Hooking new readers on the first book in a series
- Driving a book higher on bestseller lists
- Promoting a new release by discounting backlist titles
- Growing an email list or social media following
A price promotion, if done correctly and advertised effectively, can dramatically increase sales for both the discounted book as well as full-priced ones by the same author. BookBub enables authors and publishers to make people aware of their promotions, providing a cost-effective way to quickly reach a large audience.
How it Works
You place a listing order with BookBub that outlines all the information about your offer — when the book will be discounted, what the price will be, what category of subscribers you’d like to target, and at what retailers it’ll be available. If your book deal is approved, you’ll receive an email with information on how to officially schedule and pay for your listing. Before your listing runs, you coordinate with any retailers to reduce your book to the price submitted to us. The day before your listing runs, our editorial team writes a blurb about your book, and assembles all creative for the email listing. The day of your promotion, our editorial team verifies that your deal is available at all the retailers you selected, and then sends the listing as part of that day’s email.
To make sure your book and your proposed deal will be a fit, visit their GUIDELINES to learn more.
Pricing
This is our favorite part: Pricing depends on which market you’re targeting as readers fill in their genre preferences when they register, meaning, your book is sent to folks who actually read your genre. Pricing then varies by how much you’re charging for the book – the better a deal you offer Bookbub’s readers, the better the ad deal you get — a win/win!
So, in example, if you’re listing a literary fiction title that goes to 190,000 plus subscribers who’ve indicated literary fiction is a preference, it’s $550 if you’re charging over $2 for your book, but drops drastically to $220 if you’re giving the book to readers for less than a dollar, and just $110 if you’re offering it up for free. This way, Bookbub gets the best deals for readers while offering staggered prices for authors. To see current pricing, CLICK HERE.
The pricing guidelines also give you an idea of the average number of downloads for free vs. priced books, so you can more easily make a decision on how to best approach the promotion for your book.
A great idea gaining readers every day – Register as a reader (and look forward to lots of free book offers!) and if you have a small advertising budget for your book, we suggest this is an excellent place to test the waters!
Have you used Bookbub? Share your experience with other authors!
Has anyone seen book summaries delivered or books missing chapters? I read that somewhere and hoped it wasnt true. Maybe it was just someones operator-error (AKA Their fault)
I didn’t discover BookBub. They discovered me. One day last November, downloads of my free book spiked to the thousands in a matter of minutes. Curious, I googled myself, and found that they had featured my free book in their email for Romance readers. Since it was the first in a series, sales of the follow up books started to soar, and December was an amazing month for me. To thank them (and to sell more books), I offered up another book at a discount and paid about $800 for it. I made that back in a couple of hours, and sales kept coming in. I’ve since used them two more times, and if I had more books, I’d keep using them!! It’s definitely the best investment I’ve made in the promotion of my books. I now have a small but devoted following, and I’ve increased the number of ratings of my first series on Goodreads by ten times since November 24th of last year. In the first year and a half that I was on Goodreads, I’d amassed 173 ratings for Emi Lost & Found. In the past five and a half months, that number’s grown to over 1,700. I have lots of reviews on Amazon, and I’ve made a little money for myself. I cannot say enough good things about BookBub, and I’m grateful they found my book and accepted it and the others into their little world. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today – considering leaving my full time job to pursue this writing career – without them.
Lori, thanks for sharing this! Agree they’re stellar; they just plain make it easy to grab a book and have a new read in front of you in seconds. Continued success, Shari
I speak from experience. My latest novel, A Majority of One, was turned down by BookBub, and I’d bet the farm that the reason was the novel’s slant on religious zealotry. Some reviewers have told me honestly that they wouldn’t review the novel because of its theme: the Separation of Church and State. To me, that’s a sign in such people of the very prejudice that the novel depicts. Imagine the ignorance required to prefer religion over the U.S. Constitution!. Imagine such ignorant people deciding which books you will read! Actually, A Majority of One is simply a novel that focuses objectively on a clash between religion and the Constitution in a small Southern town when local preachers try to ban certain novels from the high school classroom, foremost among them, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, considered by many to be The Great American Novel — and only one person in town, high-school English teacher Anne Brady, stands up to them.
Wonderful! I like that your stand-up teacher is named Brady – a twist on Matt Brady of Inherit the Wind fame? Is she his granddaughter? Now that’d be cool 🙂 Be careful what you bet the farm on though – that some reviewers were fearful shouldn’t translate to all, lest that, too, become a prejudicial stance.
It’s a slippery slope, this artistic world, isn’t it? And always, always subjective. Like I tell folks when they’re seeking an agent or editor, it’s much like trying to make a new friend – not everyone is gonna like us or our work – guess that applies to all the gatekeepers, eh? Would be interested in learning if Bookbub has recommended or turned down other controversial subject matter…
I’m a subscriber and have used their services as an author to promote one of my books (last week, actually). I can attest to BookBub’s effectiveness, selling nearly a thousand copies the day of the promotion. I like their vetting process, which tries to ensure readers get quality books. Despite the cost, I made my money back, and looking forward to doing it again.
Fantastic James and thanks so much for sharing! We heard a similar story from another author who spent close to a thousand but has sold thousands of books. Good to hear more positive news as we think this is a great way to benefit both readers and writers.
Have to disagree about Book Bub. Their idea of criteria for acceptance of a book to display on their site includes whether they agree with what the author has written, even in fiction. With that kind of IQ at the helm, they would have declined to feature damn near every book that contained an original idea. And imagine: this is a BOOK site!
Where are you seeing that or is it something you’ve experienced personally? The only criteria I’m seeing is if it fits into one of their categories (and they do add new ones as interest grows) and that the m.s. not be riddled with errors – which seems fair to the reader and authors who don’t appreciate being lumped into the poorly spelled, badly written self-published books… They also mention favoring books with critical acclaim, but again, they’re trying to entice the most readers and a loyal following there as well.
An interesting discussion to be had here: Is this any different than book stores who may take on a book but it might never leave the storeroom’s cardboard box, or be relegated to poor shelf space? Thanks for kicking it off, Bob!