Steve Higgs
The ever-elusive BookBub Featured Deal: with all the work some authors will put in to land one, it’s easy for anyone new to the tool to wonder if they’re truly worth the hype. But whether you have never applied for a BookBub Featured Deal or applied, didn’t get one, and have long since given up, I implore you to submit your titles.
BookBub is not the only paid promotion platform out there, but some will argue that it is currently the best, or at least that its promotions have the greatest impact on an author’s sales.
So what is it?
BookBub is a subscription service, much like your newsletter. The people they email are interested enough in books to get an email from BookBub every day telling them what bargains are available.
“Bargains” is a key word. You do not have to lower your book price to $0.99 or make it free for a Featured Deal, but it pays to keep in mind that you will compete with other titles both to secure a promotion spot and to get the subscribers’ attention when the email goes out.
Here’s how you can apply for a spot in that email.
On BookBub’s author dashboard, the Featured Deal button can be found in the left-side column beneath My Promotions. That will take you to the Featured Deals page, where you can apply to have BookBub promote your book to their subscribers.
You can offer a single title—first-in-series is an obvious choice, though it can be your latest in the series or any other book you might wish to push—or you can offer a boxed set. In the past, I have had the most success promoting boxed sets.
Once you’ve decided which title or boxed set to promote, you must select the genre for your book and where you want it to be promoted. Here, select the option for all regions. The US deal is significantly more expensive than the international deal, but its effectiveness is significantly greater.
Cost
BookBub Featured Deals are expensive. “Expensive” isn’t necessarily a recognized unit of measurement, but a Cozy Mystery deal for all regions costs more than $1,000 for a one-day promotion.
However, if you set it up correctly, it can be worth it.
Look not at what you spend but at how much money you make in return. When I promoted ten Cozy Mystery books, I dropped the price to $0.99 using the 35 percent royalty option, not a Kindle Countdown Deal (KCD). The promotion cost a shade over $1,000 but made that money back within a couple of hours of the promotion going live. It propelled the title to number four in the Amazon.com chart, and as a result, it stayed in the top two hundred or three hundred titles for the next ninety days, racking up more than twenty thousand page-reads per day and netting about $30,000 more than it otherwise would have with my normal advertising.
So why not use a KCD? Following the promotion, I wanted to keep the price low, and a KCD would have automatically returned to full price at the end of the countdown period. Instead, I reset the price to $5.99 the day after the promotion ended and took advantage of its high chart position and visibility. Only when sales began to die off did I return the title to full price.
Wide or Amazon-Exclusive?
Being available only on Amazon may impact your chances of getting a Featured Deal. However, this is anecdotal evidence, not empirical; you can assume that this is accurate, but apply anyway. I have never been wide but have enjoyed many BookBub Featured Deals.
I just keep applying.
Of course, BookBub isn’t the only option. There are deal-of-the-day features on several platforms, and most of them have proven worth the investment. Whatever you do, believe that you need exposure to readers’ eyes if you want to sell books. That will almost always cost money, but it can absolutely be worth it to your author career.
Steve Higgs