With Bookbub, Should I Do the Free or the 99¢?

So when you finally have a book likely to be accepted by Bookbub, should you choose to do the free give-away or the for-sale promotion (like the 99¢ discounted pricing)?

I get that question all the time. People over-think about strategy. Marketing is just like anything we do in life. There has to be an element of unknown. When a move carries a downside risk, it also intrinsically carries an upside risk.

With Bookbub, my vote is with the free choice. The Amazon algorithm is by “affiliation.” The more people download it when they do other things on Amazon, the greater the possibilities that more people may re-trace the same route to your book.

The “reading” part is irrelevant for mass marketing. Worry about that when you are doing target-marketing on GoodReads etc. People who download and never read will NEVER buy your book anyway. But when they download, they push up your book stats. God bless them. I wish there are a hundred thousand people download mine when it’s on promotion and never read. The stats influence the real target audience of your book.

I have two books on Kindle book marketing that you may find interesting:

Whispers, Contagion & Espionage: Web Marketing with Bots (Brand new, just out this morning.)

KDP’s Best-Kept Secret Revealed: How to Embed Videos and Widgets in Your Book Description (13 readers have given it 5-star so far.)

Both books contain a lot of secrets people who ask this typical Bookbub question may not know.