As promised, a brutally honest account of my BookBub Featured Deal.
It was quite the ride. I’m still not sure quite what to make of it.
Brief recap: A few weeks ago I applied for a BookBub Featured Deal for my novel A Time and a Place. This is a newsletter that goes out once a day to (in the case of science fiction) about 1.7 million people in India, Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Statistically they figure that if you discount your book to, say, 99 cents for a few days around that time about 1900 of those 1.7 million people will buy your book (there are different packages involving different price points, including giving your book away for free). I gather BookBub gets about 200 submissions a day of authors trying to get their books into this newsletter, of which BookBub chooses one book. The books they choose are carefully curated; they only pick books they think will appeal to their audience.
So anyway, I applied for the science fiction package involving discounting my book to the painful price point of 99 cents, of which I would only receive 29 cents of each sale after Amazon and Draft2Digital take their cut (from Amazon, at least… BookBub would also direct potential readers to Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. They would have included Google Play but I didn’t have that set up yet; one of several mistakes I made during this promotion). The BookBub package itself cost $754 US. To my surprise, they accepted my book.
I was immediately suspicious.
At the time I had only the vaguest notion of what BookBub was all about. I quickly researched to determine whether this was a scam (um, if you can call a search on Google research). Cuz ideally the money flows to the writer, not the other way around. I quickly determined that, no, it wasn’t a scam. In fact, it’s considered one of (if not the) best ways to promote your book in the world of indie fiction. Many indie authors have taken advantage of it multiple times.
So I accepted their offer and the BookBub Featured Deal promotion was scheduled for Sept 13th, this past Sunday. My research suggested that a good way to optimize the promotion was to “stack” multiple promotions with other, more modest newsletters in the days leading up to and following the BookBub promotion. So I purchased additional promotions with Manybooks (Sept 11th, including an Author of the Day feature), Read Freely (Sept 12th), eBookSoda (also Sept 12th), The Fussy Librarian (Sept 23rd, the closest date they had available), and Reading Deals (a free service; never did figure what day, if ever, this ran). All of this cost $225.96 Canadian, on top of the $992.69 Canadian that the BookBub Featured deal cost, for a whopping total of $1218.65.
Hey, you only live once, and I wanted to give this a serious try.
So how did it work out?
It’s not quite done yet, as The Fussy Librarian promotion has yet to run, and the book is still featured on some of the newsletters’ websites, including BookBub. But this is where we’re at as of Thursday Sept 17th, four days after the BookBub newsletter went out.
I don’t get my sales results in real time because I’m mostly with Draft2Digital which only produces results the day after. Monday morning, the day after the Featured Deal ran, I woke up around 7am and saw that I’d sold about 300 books.
I was kinda bummed.
I checked again around 11am and that figure had jumped to 899.
I was less bummed.
Still, I had a ways to go to make up the cost of all that promotion. Over the next few days I watched as A Time and a Place clawed its way to number one on several platforms, garnering the coveted #1 bestseller tag on both the Canadian and Australian Amazon platforms in its category.
I sold roughly 1200 copies within a span of 24 hours. I thought, wow, if this keeps up I should easily make my money back by the end of the week. BookBub is apparently well known for its “tail,” where books keep selling long after the promotion. Unfortunately, sales dipped precipitously the following day, and now sit at 1287 for Amazon, Kobo, B&N, and Apple. I’ve also sold one copy to Overdrive, four audiobook copies, and 4 copies of my collection of short stories, Other Times and Places. I do have books on other platforms, but they’re new there and I don’t anticipate any appreciable sales from those.
1019 of those sales were with Amazon.
92 were with Apple.
90 were with Barnes and Noble.
88 were with Kobo.
4 were with Audible.
And 1 was with Overdrive.
So far I have made $457.04 in Royalties, which puts me at a deficit of $761.61. So yeah, I’m probably not going to make my money back for some time.
Now, I know that some of this is my fault because I’m new at this and did a few things wrong. Really, the promotion was way premature because I only have one other book out, a collection of short stories. To make this work, I should have had at least two other books out in the same series, so that the promotion drove readers to those books at a higher price point. Also, I lost money because I had the book through Draft2Digital as opposed to direct with Amazon. And I should have had Google Play properly set up and ready to go. And I probably should have skipped those other newsletters (except the free one). Hey, I’m still learning.
Still, I don’t regret it (I’m good at rationalizing). It has put A Time and a Place in the hands of 1288 additional readers (and maybe one additional library). And I’ve learned a few things.
Most importantly, that I need to write more books.
