Practical suggestions from a very active and savvy independent author:
Four years ago, I fluked winning a FREE Featured Deal. I had five other books at the time, and the sell-through, and KUs were great (250,000/month). On top of this I received an additional 70 reviews for the Featured book, most of them 5-star. At the time I knew next to nothing about BookBub and expected to keep on winning Featured Deals. Was I in for a sad awakening!
Fast forward to July 2019 when I sold a mere 100 books and had a miserable 14,809 KUs. To make matters worse, I had more than doubled my number of books. There are many reasons why the preceding occurred, but the main one was that I did no promoting either via social media or paid advertising. I should say that writing is not my prime source of income, which is just as well, because if it were, I’d be starving. That said, I have a certain amount of pride and set out to remedy the foregoing.
I decided I’d actively advertise my books in promoters’ newsletters but would not spend more than $150 per month. The results to date, while not great, are promising. I’ll sell more than 200 books in October, and my KUs will nudge 30,000. The increase in revenue more than covered my advertising costs, and my numbers are up 100%. The idea now is to compound them at the same rate for the next four months.
I have not applied for a BookBub Deal this calendar year but soon will. If I’m successful, BB will be the exception to my $150 rule. I will not accept an international Deal and am of the belief that without the U.S., BB’s Deals, even with sell-through and KUs are still likely to be losers. The U.S. is critical.
The struggle that I have had is finding six suitable promoters for the seven-day Amazon countdown period. Outside of BookBub, ENT is the absolute standout. I don’t advertise the day after ENT ($45), as I’m still getting good sales and KUs from the day prior. The next-best promoter is BookRaid because it’s cheap (about 18 cents a click and usually less than $3) and is good for approximately 10 sales. Let’s say I’m promoting a book with a rank of #300,000 … it won’t be attractive to ENT’s subscribers, but by using BookRaid on the first day and another small promoter (say Authors XP at $20) on the second day, I can lower the ranking to sub #40,000 by the time ENT’s promo kicks in on the third and fourth days. Now it gets hard as I have three days to go and a remaining budget of about $82. The promoters available are eReaderIQ, FKBT, ManyBooks, The Fussy Librarian, Robin Reads, Just Kindle Books, Book Rebel, Book Gorilla, and Book Cave. I have had reasonable success with eReaderIQ ($20), FKBT ($30), and ManyBooks ($29). I might be tempted to replace FKBT with Book Gorilla ($50), but it would blow my budget by $17, and I’d need another 25 sales to justify it, and that’s unlikely.
Finally, I tried Amazon ads when they were first introduced in the U.S. with moderate success, but the competition was too hot (Mark Dawson spent $50,000 on Amazon Ads last month). However, Amazon has just introduced ads in the U.K., and I have 10 running, and they’re doing okay. I’m running them for two reasons … first-mover advantage and currently I hardly make any sales in the U.K.
