Shawn P. B. Robinson

A short while ago I asked a friend of mine, author J. A. Paul, some questions about one of the ways he sells his books. I had actually first become acquainted with this author through Bookbub and thought, “I want to understand Bookbub better. He’s probably the guy to ask!”

Bookbub is a system where you can sign up for a daily email, listing books that are on sale or free. The great thing about Bookbub is that they let readers pick the genres of books that they like and Bookbub only sends emails about those books. For instance, if you sign up for their email, you can select Sci-Fi, Children’s books and Cooking and the only books Bookbub will email you about are books in those categories. There are a number of services like this (MyBookCave, Fussy Librarian, Book Gorilla, Booktastic, etc), but Bookbub is the big one.

NOTE: On a side note, as authors, we often struggle to fit our books into its proper genre. I think the reason for this is first of all because our books often do not fit a specific genre perfectly. Second, I think we are often too close to our books to figure it out.  🙂  For some clear direction on this matter, check out Self-Publishing School’s blog post on the topic of picking genres.

Here is how Bookbub describes themselves:

“BookBub is a free service that helps you discover books you’ll love through unbeatable deals, handpicked recommendations, and updates from your favorite authors. BookBub doesn’t actually sell books. We simply introduce you to books you’ll love that are available on retailers like Amazon’s Kindle store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store, Apple Books, and others.”

For authors, Bookbub (and services like it) can be a HUGE boost for your sales and exposure, but you’ll have to experiment with the various services offered to see how much they benefit you. Here are some of the author services:

An Author Page

The Author page is a place where you can set up your books so readers can follow you. I currently have 80,000 followers. Well… it’s either 80,000 followers or it’s 4 followers. It’s hard to know with that kind of thing. I’m actually leaning toward the number being 4, not 80,000. Yes, it’s 4. I have 4 followers.

One of the perks of having a following on Bookbub is when you add a new book, all your followers will get an email notice saying, “Hey! Your favorite author ever just came out with a new book!” Bookbub may not say it quite like that, but they will let your followers know.

Bookbub Ads

These are ads you can create yourself. These ads will go out over email, but are at the bottom of the email and will not likely gain quite the exposure/sales that you’ll get with Bookbub Featured deals (see below). You can either pay per click or you can pay per impressions (people seeing it). I have run a number of Bookbub Ads and have had mixed results. Some people have had GREAT results, though. You need to play around with it a lot to get everything working just the way you want it.
It is recommended that you focus your Bookbub Ads by targetting the followers of one specific author (with a huge following). This will allow you to zero in with your ad.

Featured Deals

This is where it’s at. For Authors, Featured Deals are where you sell or give away the most books.

The way a Featured Deal works is you pay a price to have your book included in their massive email list (they boast 10 million) as either a free or discounted ebook. You won’t, of course, get your book sent out to all 10 million readers. Only readers who sign up for your genre of book will get an email notice of your Featured Deal. For example, my books are middle-grade fiction and Bookbub has 540,000 readers signed up in that genre. Crime Fiction is the big category with over 3.8 million readers.

The price you pay depends a lot on the category and the discount applied to your book. For instance, a free book in African American Interest (the most affordable category) costs $113. Bookbub states you’ll likely get about 4,100 downloads for a free book in that category (not bad). If you were to list a Crime Fiction for $3.99, your Bookbub fee would be nearly $4,000, but Bookbub suggests you’ll get upwards of 3,600 books sold (which should be more than worth the $4,000 price tag).

Now, these prices can be significantly cheaper if you choose to sell only in the US or only internationally.

You can find specific pricing by going to Bookbub’s pricing page here.

One of the challenges, however, is that Bookbub is really picky about which books they will accept. You can’t just sign up for a Featured Deal anytime you want. Here is some information about their selection process.

The real-life results!

This is where J. A. Paul’s experience with Bookbub gives us a lot of insight into how well this strategy can work for you as an author. Keep in mind that everyone’s results will be a little different and the pricing seems to have gone up a bit since his book, Gladius and the Bartlett Trial, went out over Bookbub. Here are four questions/answers from J. A. Paul that’ll give some more insight into the process.

How many times have you used Bookbub for Featured Deals?

I have only been lucky enough to receive a Bookbub promotion twice but I have found that both times it has been worth it.

What kind of cost are we looking at for a Bookbub Featured Deal and what were your results?

Both times I ran a FREE promotion on my book Gladius and the Bartlett Trial. The first time was the best. The cost for doing a Bookbub promo varies on the genre. Mine was around $80 to promote the book and I had just under 10k downloads over a 3 day period. Then I had about 90 kindle books sell at full price ($2.99) in the following several days. At the 70% royalty rate, you can sum up that I received my money back and then some. However, the really nice part is I gained a handful of reviews and had hundreds of newsletter sign-ups, presumably from the link in the back of my book or from curious readers who may have clicked on my website.

The second promo was for the second book in the series a little over a year later. It cost approximately the same and also was a FREE book give away. Again, I easily made my money back but I did not have as many downloads. I had just under 7k downloaded and over 60 sold in the following days.

How else did you benefit from your Featured Deals?

Another benefit is the improvement in the ranking of your book. After the Bookbub promo ends Amazon continues to promote the book based on the improved sales rank which then, in turn, increases the Kindle Unlimited readers and Amazon pays per page read on a monthly basis. In each of my Bookbub promos, these KU pages read continued for months afterward totaling into the tens of thousands of page reads. These earned me another couple hundred dollars in the months after the Bookbub promos. But you have to be exclusive to KDP for that to happen. It’s a nice benefit of being exclusive with KDP but I wonder how well the books would have done with the Bookbub promo if I was wide on Kobo, Apple, Google Play and Barnes/Noble.

I have gained over 400 followers on Bookbub and had a dozen or so readers “like” my books on the Bookbub site.

What advice would you give when trying to get on Bookbub?

I must have tried to get on Bookbub a dozen times before being accepted so my advice is simple. Read, understand and follow their rules and expectations and then be persistent.

There you have it! Some really helpful information on Bookbub. I hope this gives you a good idea of how you can make use of Bookbub in promoting your books!

Let me encourage you as well to check out J. A. Paul’s books, grab a copy of book one or two, and make sure you leave him some reviews.

www.authorjapaul.com
www.facebook.com/authorJAPaul
www.goodreads.com/author/show/3067712.J_A_Paul

Shawn