Bookbub Sale Results
I was over the moon to finally get the holy grail - a featured ad on Bookbub.
For those of you who don't know, Bookbub has long been seen as the best promotional website for book sales. No other company comes close.
As such, despite its steep prices, there's fierce competition to get a place.
My Book Background
Like many other authors, I have been trying every month for the past few years to get a Bookbub deal.
I have been applying with what I consider my strongest choice - The Shadow Rises, originally published 2013.
This book is the first in the Witch-Hunter series, which has 4 other full-price books in it.
I also have 5 more books in other series, so I have a reasonable catalogue for other sales
The Shadow Rises is perma-free (which means it's really flexible on when I can run promos). It currently has 155 ratings on Amazon US and 276 on Goodreads. It is also "wide", so it is available from most eretailers.
It's been a consistently good seller for me over the years, but I still couldn't seal a Bookbub deal.
So I went away and tried to come up with a more attractive deal.
I played around with a few ideas (with the help of fellow author Wilmar Luna, who has been great at listening to me ramble on), but finally settled on turning my trilogy into a box-set.
This meant that:
a) I could offer a better deal across the whole trilogy (with a further 2 books in the series available at full price);
b) I could get a new cover that would appeal to a new audience.
(Cover courtesy of the amazing Creative Paramita)
Witch-Hunter Trilogy
This box-set is only available from Amazon.
Despite this restriction, and only having 10 reviews on Amazon US, and 18 on Goodreads; my book was accepted by Bookbub on only my second attempt!
The Deal
My book Witch-Hunter Trilogy, normal price £5.99, sale price £0.99.
Bookbub will be promoting it in the UK only.
My discount ran from 21st - 27th December 2020.
Bookbub emailed me on the 16th December to organise their promo, so I had to scramble round to get other book promos lined up at short notice in the run-up to Christmas...
I would liked to have run an ad on Bargain Booksy (which gives good results), and Fussy Librarian (bargain book promos aren't great, but they're very cheap); but both were fully-booked.
I also failed to get into ENT, but applied to several others.
I did get BookSends, Bookscream and Book Doggy, I haven't used these before, so I'm interested to see how they perform.
Results
Monday 21st December
(I had planned on doing a paid FB promo, but only found out that they had blocked me with no explanation, at the last minute.)
Trilogy: 7 copies sold
KENP: 1 page
Tuesday 22nd December
Trilogy: 21 sales
Free download: 16
Wednesday 23rd December
Trilogy: 122 sales
Free download: 554
Thursday 24th December
Trilogy: 31 sales
Free download: 105
Friday 25th December
Free download: 43
Saturday 26th December
Trilogy: 19
Free download: 44
Sunday 27th December
Trilogy: 10
Free download: 31
Bookbub handily offers a list of average downloads for various genres and regions.
For the Supernatural Suspense category my book was accepted for, they say the average downloads for International (i.e. everywhere non-US) is 410.
As my deal was only available in the UK (one of the cons of using the KDP price-drop function), I am very happy with the 153 downloads that I can attribute to Bookbub (it's probably the reason for more downloads throughout the week, but I'm looking at the minimum ROI).
For my 99p box-set on Amazon's 70% royalty scheme, I got about 64p per download. This means at worst, I got £97.92 ($131.79) for the 153 Bookbub downloads.
Which means I turned a minimum profit of about $14 on Bookbub (likely much more!).
Another benefit I had this week, was that my book hit the top spot in an Amazon Category, and it briefly got a coveted orange best-seller tag.
Post-Sale
The sale only finished a few days ago, but I can already see the difference. I have had an increase in KENP, and a few full-priced sales of the Trilogy.
I'm definitely going to keep applying for a US promo, and I will apply for an International promo in future (your book can only be featured once every 6 months). Although I may experiment with the pricing (i.e. set my ebook at $0.99 - I'll only get 30% royalties, but I'll be able to do the deal across all locations).
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