Need thoughts and advice on attempting a BookBub promotion

If you aren't accepted for an ad, you can try again at some future date--can't remember if it's thirty days or sixty days or what.

However, the real power of a Bookbub ad is drawing attention to a body of work, which is why people often get them for first book in a series. If you only have one book out there, it's likely not worth it. There are similar venues that do the same thing for a fraction of the cost, but again, part of the whole reason for doing it is to create awareness of a body of work. And while all that is what I've observed and heard from other authors in regard to fiction, I believe the same thing would apply to non-fiction titles as well. Honestly, I think your best bet is to put your energy into completing and publishing more books.

Bongo said:

Anybody else have any thoughts, suggestions, or links to other reputable places to do a book promotion?

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There are a couple of threads here discussing the effectiveness of promo sites.

For me, nothing compares to Bookbub. The second-tier sites that I've used in the past are E-Reader News Today (ENT), Free Kindle Books & Tips (FKBT), and Fussy Librarian. All of them are considerably less effective now than they were 2-3 years ago, however.

My first BookBub was yesterday, in the Supernatural Suspense category. It was at least the fifth submission for the book that was accepted, my Quincy Harker, Year 1 novella collection. As of this writing, around 36 hours after the promo emails went out, the promo has paid for itself and made a little profit. The book was priced at $.99, and the overall cost was $448.00, making for a breakeven point of around 1,280 copies of that book. Currently I'm sitting at around 1,350 copies sold. I don't yet have numbers from ACX for audio, and the Draft2Digital numbers for today are pretty laggy, so I don't know exactly what my non-Amazon numbers look like.

Yesterday the book moved 1,006 ebooks on Amazon, and 177 on other platforms. This was good enough to get to the Top 4 in Horror, and #2 in Dark Fantasy. I'm fairly pleased with the results, and have high hopes for future sales, as this is the first of three books, and this series has a good sell-through rate, typically.

Here's what I did differently this time to get accepted - I pulled the series from KDP Select and put it into wide distribution. Then I took a good look at the books that were getting BookBub promotions. The only things I saw listed in my genres at higher price points than $.99 were box sets or major label trade pub books, and since I am a small press, I bit the bullet and priced the book at $.99. I don't like selling the book for that price, but if it gets 1,300 people to look at the series, it should pick up a couple hundred new fans over the long term, so that's worth it. I had previously only submitted deals at either free or $2.99, and received over a dozen rejections. This time I got accepted. I did not apply for Supernatural Suspense, that's the category they selected for me, and it seems to have done well enough. So those are the things I did, and I got accepted after multiple submissions. Your mileage may obviously vary. Good luck!