I’ve just had my best number of downloads from BookBub promotion and thanks are due to Jane Davis, who so generously shared her results and tips.
Jane’s advice was to keep the book at the promotion price for as long as possible. In my case that was free and after four weeks, I have had 20,779 downloads of which 19,829 downloads were a result of the promotion. (The other 940 came from Amazon readers who look out for free books).
The results were: Draft2Digital (all territories) where the big players are Kobo and iBooks, 4210. Amazon Australia 1004, Canada 1777, UK 9790. I even had 3994 downloads in the USA, where the book was free, but where I hadn’t advertised. Despite umpteen approaches, I’ve never been successful at getting a US BookBub slot. And even if I could, I can’t justify spending $385 on one marketing promotion.
My promo cost me $105. The real cost was $5, as the rest came from writing income from a publisher. My intention here was to get more readers (and, I hope, reviews). I didn’t see many (or expect) sales across my other titles, as I write in different genres.
Because I had a problem with Amazon failing to price match a competitor, in this case, Kobo, I was forced to reschedule my BookBub slot. Again, it was Jane who suggested I use Draft2Digital to upload to all the other retailers. And I’m so glad I did this, as not only has D2D the most user-friendly interface of all the retailers, but it delivered over 4000 downloads.
The biggest hurdle was getting Amazon to price match. When they did finally agree they refused to do so in India. While the book was free in all the other territories, Indian consumers still had to pay. This may be a policy decision, as many other BookBub clients have had a similar problem.
My figures might not sound much to those of you who write commercial fiction, but for a political thriller, it seemed good to me.
When I pitched for a slot in the international territories – (Australia, Canada, India and the UK) I told them that my book had characters from all their international territories, including the Indian sub-continent. Whether or not that helped, I don’t know, but I got the listing.
Before this promotion, I had a total of 50 reviews spread evenly across Amazon in the UK and the USA but none on Kobo. So far I have 3 reviews on Kobo, 16 star ratings, 2 more reviews on Amazon US, 1 on Amazon Canada, 7 additional ratings on Goodreads as well as 2 more reviews. Not all reviews have been great, but I was impressed that the reviewers still managed to read to the end.