For Indie authors trying to promote their books, the name BookBub looms very large. Once I finished blindly flailing about, I discovered that BookBub is the leading name in promotion of e-books by e-mail. I also learned that they’re hard to get in with. But eventually, they accepted Death of Secrets.
Bookbub has certain requirements: The price you give them has to be the lowest for which the book has been advertised anywhere else. It has to be a limited time special. Unfortunately, I had put Death of Secrets at $0.99 as a regular price starting in March, which made it hard to get listed in bookbub for that price.
I put the novel on free promotion, and paid BookBub $220 to list it. I also sent the free promotion to a few smaller e-mail lists that promote free e-books. As usual, I scheduled like a bazillion tweets over the course of the free promotion.
What happened?
Over the course of the free promotion (April 29-30) the book was downloaded 40,000 times. Let me repeat that: Forty Thousand. My previous free promotion had 5,700 downloads. So yeah, BookBub can move e-books.
But of course, those are all free. Your humble narrator makes zero. Obviously, it’s a great audience builder for the sequel, which is the main point at this stage of my writing “career.” But still, one yearns for entrepreneurial success as well.
Good news!
Amazon. of course, lists books based on their sales. So by spiking the downloads so hard, Death of Secrets was all of a sudden much more visible on Amazon to people who are looking for thrillers. What that means is, after a free promotion, there’s always a spike in paid sales. In this case, that spike was pretty impressive.
I set the price back to $2.99 after the free promo, rather than $0.99. (more on the pluses and minuses of the two price points in a later post). And at that price, the day after the huge free promo, 220 people bought Death of Secrets. In the intervening days, the number has grown to 320.
Since $2.99 qualifies for the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, I get roughly $2.05 per sale. That means, of course, that I’ve made $656 in royalties so far in May. Given that the BookBub promo cost $220, that qualifies as a smashing success!
Now, the trick is to keep the success going. I have a couple other promotions scheduled today and later this month. I’ll post again about how things develop.