Marketing Your Book in a Flooded Market

Author G. W. Lücke writes about his experiences marketing his excellent fantasy Relevation series of books (book two is out shortly):

“I focussed on book reviews from well-known critics (e.g. Kirkus) early on, and while I received good reviews, they didn’t translate into book sales.

 A few reviews from bloggers also did nothing much — a couple of books sold.

 I read the David Gaughran book on how to use BookBub and followed it to the letter. I’ve sold the most books through this — but the bottom line was that I was paying more for the Bookbub ads than I was getting back in book sales (all sales of the eBook at 0.99c).

 Such an approach is not sustainable.

“Given I’m new to all this — my objective opinion about the whole publishing business is the book market is currently flooded and selling books is bloody hard. ”

 Given I’m new to all this — my objective opinion about the whole publishing business is the book market is currently flooded and selling books is bloody hard. Way too much choice for people. Global best-selling authors sell their eBooks for $1.99 on Bookbub — why would readers try an unknown author given they can get known authors so cheaply?

 There are lots of sites claiming to help you develop marketing plans — but I doubt any of them work. And I don’t have the time to do all the social media marketing. Writing is my hobby, not my job. I do it for the love of it.

 Selling lots of books was way down my priority list when I started this journey. It still is.

 I’ve had the most satisfying experience selling to friends and their friends – sold about 50 hard copies via word of mouth alone (and I get a much bigger margin from this).

 Selling directly to people I know or made contact with via email, also means I get feedback from them when they finish the book. I think I’ve had over 50 formal and informal reviews of the book via various channels.

 Out of those, I’ve only had one negative review. So most people who read the book like it – which is all I could ask for.”

With review quotes like this, hopefully interest in this series will gradually build:

“When Darkness Descends' follows multiple narratives in the fictional world of Enthilen, with particular focus on the (human) protagonist Tom Anderson as he battles to uncover the mystery behind his grandmother's death when he finds himself lost within this mysterious world. G.W. Lücke's storytelling is absolutely captivating, and had me hooked from the very first page. The characters and plot line have been very clearly carefully constructed, with the author able to find a perfect balance of authenticity in character personalities mixed with the complete fantasy of the setting they live in. The novel has been left at a frustratingly exciting end point, leaving me (and I'm sure other readers too!) desperate to see what comes next! Highly recommend to older teenage readers who enjoy fantasy and adventure.”

Amazon advertising and BookBub

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.

Bookbub Speaks, Advises

An author client recently got in touch with ebook promotional giant Bookbub to discuss the disappointing performance of a paid ad posted on that platform. He received the following interesting response, worth reading in full for anyone considering using the service or applying for the oly grail of a featured deal (as with so many areas of the Internet, Bookbub is overwhelmingly dominant in its space):

Thanks for reaching out! I'm sorry to hear your recent ad campaign didn't produce the results you were hoping for. I'll note that it does require quite a bit of testing and tweaking to develop ad campaigns that get the results you're looking for. When getting started with ads, we recommend that partners spend some time committed to testing ads with small budgets of $5-$10. Generally, you're unlikely to see a positive return immediately out of the gate with no testing.

I'd encourage you to read through some of our blog posts to get more familiar with BookBub Ads. I've gone ahead and listed a few that I think you'll find helpful below:

- First, you can find a blog post on increasing your click-through rate here: https://insights.bookbub.com/increase-click-through-rate-bookbub-ads-campaign/
- Next, you can read about how marketing goals affect BookBub ad campaigns here: https://insights.bookbub.com/how-marketing-goals-affect-bookbub-ad-campaigns-infographic/
- Finally, you can view our ultimate guide to BookBub Ads here: https://insights.bookbub.com/ultimate-guide-bookbub-ads/#getting-started

If you want to learn more about BookBub Ads, I'd suggest that you read through some other posts in the BookBub Ads section of our blog here for more tutorials, campaign ideas, and best practices.

I'm happy to answer any questions your have around Featured Deals:
1.) Currently, we rarely feature new releases in our daily emails. We’ve found that books that have had a chance to build up their platform perform best and, therefore, make for the most successful promotions for our partners.
2.) Your promotion's length is completely up to you and your marketing goals. You're welcome to discount your book for just a day, or a whole week or more if you'd like. We happen to have a blog post that discusses what promotion lengths work best for different marketing goals here. I hope you find that post helpful!
3.) Critical reviews play a role in our editor's selection process, so it would certainly be helpful for your title to have some reviews associated with it. You're absolutely welcome to submit this book for consideration, but please note that, as mentioned above, we tend to feature books that have built up their platform. If you're interested, you can learn more about the editorial team's selection process here.

Selling Your Book Online — An Expert Speaks

Irish writer David Gaughran has plenty to say about maintaining an online “author platform” and driving online sales. Some of his pithier quotes:

“As well as promoting my own books, I’ve run giant campaigns for huge authors over the last couple of years, launching multiple books into the Top 100, running major backlist promotions that generated tens of thousands of sales during their foray into the charts, and million and millions of page reads, as well as multiple Kindle Unlimited awards. Some of these campaigns can generate extraordinary profits.”

“BookBub is the most famous, obviously, and is significantly larger than all the other sites combined with millions of genuine book buyers on its lists. There are no sure things in marketing, but a BookBub Featured Deal is the closest you’ll get. Authors typically report making the cost back in twenty-four hours or less, and then enjoying a significant increase in visibility and sellthrough and email sign-ups and reviews. ”

“Before the “do you not VALUE books?” crowd get warmed up, let me say this: those cheap deals are used to pole-vault us into position to shift even more books at full price. A springboard, if you like. I don’t focus so much on prices anyway, these things are all tools to me. I prefer to look at monthly income. Running price promotions increases it greatly. ”

He goes into quite generous detail about the various aspects of his online selling strategy here.

Mr Gaughran runs a mailing list here. Subscribers will receive useful hints re. online promotion and a 50 page booklet on selling with Amazon Kindle.

Bookbub's Effectiveness — A Report from an Author

In the latest news from the independent author front , Kathryn Gauci reports back on her recent Bookbub promotion:

“Bookbub was OK but didn't set the world on fire. I think some of that had to do with it being for the UK, AUS, NZ, Canada and India and NOT the US. The US is generally the biggest market. It also adds more to the deal in the first place. The real difference has come with it lifting my profile and follow on orders plus the page reads have more than doubled per day. So hopefully the momentum keeps up. I also put it up on a few other sites for a couple of days at the same time — Fussy Librarian etc, which I think helped. My friend, Barbara had one the week before and spent more on extra promo. Same Bookbub deal as me. She just recovered her cost but the follow-on has improved. Another friend had the US market as well and doubled her money.
It was worth it though. And the extra reviews and ratings are starting to come through also.”

Bookbub is not for Babies

Many authors have never heard of Bookbub. The service is essentially a regular email offering selected discounted ebooks to a massive subscriber list. Most of the titles promoted therein are from major publishers, but a significant fraction are from independent authors and small publishers. Publishers and authors pay over $600 per title just to be considered for inclusion in their featured deals. They are extremely powerful in the world of ebook sales and massively profitable.

Peter Ralph has done a stellar job analysing the performance of bookbub and advising authors how to get one of the sought after featured deals. Other bloggers have useful posts about setting up effective ads for Bookbub, Others point out that while the sales spike created by bookbub is real and substantial, it can be rather short lived. This author suggests that the real benefit of being featured on bookbub is exposing the rest of your published work to a new audience.

In a world where bookstores, though gamely hanging on, represent a decreasing fraction of overall print sales (not to mention ebooks and audibooks), authors have to come to terms with the necessary techniques for online sales success, and letting the market know they even exist.

Bookbub Explained

Bestselling author Peter J. Ralph has turned his considerable research skills to the secrets behind the most successful promoter of ebooks, Bookbub. Our cover was intended to illustrate the dramatic effect that being selected for the Bookbub newsletter can have on the sales of a particular title. Typefaces used are League Gothic and Marianina.