Marketing & Promoting Part 2
For promoting, Bookbub runs a targeted daily newsletter that is emailed to their subscribers. Authors can purchase a daily deal promotion and their book will be featured on the day of the promotion to readers in your specified genre. BookSweeps, Freebooksy, Bargain Booksy, and the Fussy Librarian all operate on the same idea. They have thousands of readers that sign up to receive a targeted email based on their genre preference. The authors pay to be featured in these emails. These emails go out daily and new books/ authors are featured each day. Readers get a free or discounted book and you get to reach a targeted audience of 50,000 or more, that may potentially buy or download your novel.
The authors typically see an increase in sales and downloads the day they are featured, and typically for the next 2-3 days as subscribers open their emails. Prices vary as do their guidelines. Make sure you spend some time researching each one and decide on the best one for your needs. Several of these sites have both a free book newsletter and a bargain book newsletter that go out each day. It is up to the author if they want to offer a free book or a discounted book.
Each of these platforms offer author profile pages, featured deal of the day, or series features and some other tools. Performance does vary with each of these, depending on your genre, how your book is presented and a bit of luck. I personally am still trying each of these and recently just had a nice response from a freebooksy promotion. I will be posting an article about my personal strategy and results soon, so keep an eye out for it.
There can be an overwhelming amount of these sites and it can take some time to get the hang of each one, to see good results and to figure out which site or sites you want to go with for the long-term. I strongly suggest keeping a password notebook on your desk somewhere if you decide to go gung-ho and join them all. It will become a chore to remember all of those sites, logins and passwords.
Personally, I am doing two at a time and watching results before dropping the least lucrative one and trying a new one. Trial and error style. I have placed several promotions with The Fussy Librarian and those results have not been great. I did see some increase in sales, about 20-25 sales each day that my book was featured. Recently, as I mentioned, I used Freebooksy to run a free book promotion and offered my debut novel, "Breach." This book was featured for one day in their newsletter but I saw results for 5 straight days, netting more than 2,880 downloads.
This was incredible to see and not only did my offered novel do very well, but I also sold several dozen copies of the sequel, "Beyond The Breach" and had it dowloaded to KU quite a few times. The impacts of this one promotion are still going as I continue to see an increase in my KU page reads and consistent sales. My post next week will talk about this promotion a bit more and details the full strategy that I employed during those five days.
www.thefussylibrarian.com
www.freebooksy.com
www.booksweeps.com