Adventures in Book Promotion
How much can I earn from putting my novel on promo sites like BargainBooksy or Fussy Librarian?
My debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People, published this May. I knew that I would need to create some kind of momentum to keep sales going after my friends, family, and fans purchased the book, so I started looking into book promo sites.
Here’s how these sites work: you pay a certain amount of money for the site to feature your book in its mailing list. This could be a good way for your book to reach tens of thousands of potential readers, or it could be a waste of money.
There was only one way to find out.
I ran five book promos over three months: two with BargainBooksy, and one each with ReadingDeals, ManyBooks, and Fussy Librarian. Overall, I was satisfied with my book promotion efforts; in four of the five cases, book sales earned back the cost of promotion.
In that fifth case, however, I only sold one copy.
Let’s take a look at how each sale performed:
BargainBooksy
I started my book promotion adventure with BargainBooksy because it had only one requirement for entry: your book must be priced between $0.99 and $5. (Mine is $3.99.)
The cost of a BargainBooksy promo varies depending on your genre. I’m literary fiction, which meant my promo cost $35; if you’re writing paranormal romance, expect to pay $70.
The first BargainBooksy promo ran in August and correlated with 28 sales, or $75.18 in royalties. (I’m using the word “correlated” here because I can’t prove that all 28 of those sales came from BargainBooksy; some of them could have come from my website or my mailing list.)
Those sales also got The Biographies of Ordinary People to #120 in Amazon’s Literary Fiction>Sagas category.
BargainBooksy allows you to run one promo per month, so I ran a second BargainBooksy promo in September. This didn’t perform quite as well, assumedly because most of the people who were interested in Biographies bought it during the first promo. It correlated with 14 sales or $37.38 in royalties—which at least earned back the cost of promotion.
I was very satisfied with my BargainBooksy results and plan to run another Biographies promo in the future, though I’m going to wait until early 2018 to give my book a chance to feel fresh.
ReadingDeals and ManyBooks
In late September, I set up The Biographies of Ordinary People’s first sale. I dropped the price from $3.99 to $1.99 for a week, during which I ran promos on ReadingDeals and ManyBooks.
ReadingDeals promotions cost $29 regardless of genre; your book is required to have at least 5 Amazon reviews and 4 Amazon stars, and your book must also be on sale.
ManyBooks also costs $29 regardless of genre, though I received a discount that brought the cost down to $24. With ManyBooks, you need at least 10 Amazon reviews and 4 stars, and your book needs to be free or discounted by 50 percent—and it must be your book’s lowest price in the past three months.
Here’s how the sale performed:
- I got 43 sales the day I discounted my book to $1.99, without doing any other promotion. (I’m assuming Amazon notified readers that my book was now on sale, because I hadn’t even announced the sale yet.)
- I got 44 sales during the remainder of the sale period, during which the ReadingDeals and ManyBooks promos both ran.
The sale week earned me $116.49 in royalties. It also bumped me to #75 in my category:
Fussy Librarian
I ran a Fussy Librarian promo in October. Fussy Librarian doesn’t require your book to be on sale, but it does require at least 10 reviews and a 4-star Amazon rating, and your book must be priced below $5.99.
My Fussy Librarian promo cost me $16—pricing varies by genre, though it never goes higher than $18—and correlated with one sale. (I was a little disappointed, because fussy librarians are my novel’s target audience—along with Millennials who grew up loving Little Women and Anne of Green Gables.)
At first I wondered if the low sales were related to the number of people on Fussy Librarian’s mailing list, but I don’t think that’s the case; Fussy Librarian’s literary fiction list includes 97,118 subscribers, and BargainBooksy’s literary fiction list includes 98,500 subscribers.
Maybe it was just bad luck—or maybe those 97,118 literary fiction fans weren’t all that interested in my book.
Still, four out of the five promos were successful, and I plan on continuing similar types of book promotions in the future. I definitely want to do BargainBooksy again, and as soon as Biographies earns some kind of accolade that might make it a good candidate for BookBub’s selection process, I’ll be ready to put down the major cash it takes to get on BookBub’s mailing list. (Seriously. It’s a few hundred bucks minimum, and can go into the thousands—but many books on BookBub’s list make thousands of sales.)
Have you had similar success with book promo sites? Are there any you’d recommend, or any you’d suggest avoiding? If you had better luck with Fussy Librarian than I did, please let me know!
Nicole Dieker is a freelance writer, a senior editor at The Billfold, and a columnist at The Write Life. Her debut novel, The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000, published in May 2017; sign up with her TinyLetter to learn more about Volume 2.
