Bookbub – Graeme Ing, Author

Bookbub

BookPileIn February 2016, I ran a week-long promotion with Bookbub. For those unfamiliar with the name, it's a service that emails readers informing them of free or heavily discounted books. It is reckoned to be the best promotional service for a book, guaranteed to reach tens or hundreds of thousands of readers interested specifically in a genre – in my case, Fantasy.

Bookbub US is notoriously difficult to get accepted into. They are very picky to guarantee their readers get the best deals. It's not uncommon to be rejected several times before getting a slot. But this time, I opted for Bookbub non-US. Easier to get into, but smaller audiences.

I paid $140 to get Necromancer mailed to readers in the UK, Canada and India. The $3.99 ebook would be discounted to 99c, a total steal. The discount would be available for 7 days on Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Nook and Google Play. Bookbub predicted I would sell 410 books.

Let's see how I did…

Here's the very typical sales graph (From Amazon), where one sees a huge spike day 1 when all those readers open their Bookbub emails. The sales taper off as the week goes on.

Bookbub_KDP

To put this into perspective, currently, 18 months after this books' launch, I am selling about 1 copy/day on Amazon. That first day I sold 231! I was still selling about 16-20 per day at the end of the week.

In total, across all retailers, I sold 529 books. In a week. Now, Stephen King probably sells this many of a single book per day, or even per hour, but this is a big number for me.

Let's see how this breaks down…

BookbubRetailers

BookbubCountries

So what did I make? Total Earnings: $217. This gave me a profit of $77, but the goal of the promotion was to get my book into the hands of more readers, especially outside of the US. More readers means more potential fans, more reviews, more word-of-mouth sales, etc. Making a profit on the promotion is simply good business sense.

For any authors out there wondering about Bookbub, I think my results speak for themselves.

 

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2 comments
Christine Rains says February 29, 2016

Thanks for this, Graeme. I recently looked at the prices on Bookbub and was scared away, but it seems that it is as good as everyone is saying. And congrats on all the sales! 🙂

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David says May 9, 2016

Thanks for this useful information

: I recommend also on the site 

http://www.ebookstage.com/welcome/MTEwMA==/

another great option to promote ebooks online

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