After a number of attempts, I finally got accepted for a Featured Deal on BookBub, the world’s number one book promotion service. The book in question was The Ghost of Normandy Road.
Here’s a few things I did prior to, during and after the campaign.
Housekeeping: It is a strange moment when you receive that email from BookBub Partners that you’ve been selected for a Featured Deal! It was a Saturday around 10:30pm (U.K. Time) when I checked my email using my phone. I only did so as a distraction….I was loading a DVD at the time and it was going through the motions. Suddenly, there was this wonderful message from BookBub in my inbox.
I had sent through my application on the 22nd June, and BookBub sent me the selection notification promptly only two days later. They also kept in touch with me leading up to the promotion. In short, they have been wonderful to work with.
Many of my books are available on Barnes & Noble for their Nook ereader. I had never hit number one in its category on B&N before. In fact, my traction on the non-Amazon outlets was relatively poor. This year, I decided to have a mix of my titles on Kindle Unlimited, but also a number of them (about 40% of my titles) via Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Tolino, Overdrive, Vivlio, Scribd and more.
Day One Sales (15th July 2020) – Amazon 566
Day One – Three (15th-17th July 2020) Kobo, Apple, B&N 359
BookBub’s prediction of around 910 sales turned out to be pretty accurate, but as fun as that inaugral BookBub day was, what followed in the days, weeks (and best part of the month afterwards) was considerably more interesting. My bottom line of sales had considerably risen. My sales on the non-Amazon platforms have continued to grow without hardly any promotion on those platforms.
Day Two Sales (16th July 2020) Amazon 166
A month later, and I am in discussions with Apple for a ‘First in Free’ deal on the Haunted Minds series (the only stipulation was that all the books in the series had to be avaialble on Apple). So there are lots of wonderful things happening! The book they featured, The Ghost of Normandy Road is still selling even though it is back to its regular price of $3:49.
If you are an author looking to make the best seller lists such as top in your desired category, or want a crack at the New York Times or USA Today Best Seller list, keep on until you get a BookBub offer. You can still place ads on there without a featured deal, but it is great to be accepted when you know that 4 out of 5 submissions are rejected.
Above: Using a tool to snapshot my projected sales for the month, this showed that if the above numbers remained in place for four weeks, then it was quite realistic to earn over $6,000 USD for that month, which is awesome of course. This tool has turned out to be pretty accurate for me, returning results of between 60-80% accuracy.
Above: A snapshot of my BookBub profile. I always encourage my readers / blog visitors to follow me on BookBub so that they will get news about book releases or featured deals.
Social media impact: Most followers of my Facebook author page get there via giveaways I run on this website. Some are real fans and do post updates. Twitter is not so viable for me, but I continue to post on there. (I do not use Instagram at this time). I am looking to build on my current crop of BookBub followers. My readers group helped share news of my BookBub promotion, so social media can help in an indirect way. I achieved my BookBub sales without any major social media postings. I was running ads on BookBub (which are different to the featured deals) but nothing else – and yet the results were still fantastic.
I also gained a slew of new reviews, mostly positive, which proves that BookBub have great readers with all kinds of opinions on there.