Bookbub

[Jim]

Just saw a page advertising Bookbub, but this time for readers rather than authors.
http://booktalk.bookbub.com/private/1...

The page signed off with “I now have more books than I can read in a lifetime,” said Suzie Miller of Auburn, WA. She said she has downloaded more than 350 free ebooks using the service.

Given they would want me as an author to spend serious money with them https://www.bookbub.com/partners/pricing

I'm afraid I'm not tempted

[Patti (baconater)]

Only 350? Suzie is a lightweight.

[Jim]

Patti (baconater) wrote: "Only 350? Suzie is a lightweight."

oh I know, but what a thing to say when you depend on authors giving you money in the hope that Suzie will hand over money for their book! ;-)

I get a feeling they need a way of stopping authors reading the 'wrong' website :-)

[Will]

350 books is more than she can read in a lifetime? Really?

[Jim]

depends how old she is or her general state of health :-)

[David]

Hmm ... they've either become stupefyingly successful or greedy. When I looked at this a couple of years ago it was free if the book was free.

[Jim]

I always like to check how well the books being promoted are doing

The first fantasy title was Flame of Requiem: The Complete Trilogy by Daniel Arenson
So I checked on Amazon, it's the same price, 99p on Amazon
But it's at 1,723,847 in Books
That's not a fabulously successful promotion.
Admittedly better than my paperbacks are doing, but I'm nobody and I'm not spending a thousand dollars on a bookbub promotion

I suspect greed rather than stupefying success to be honest

[Anna]

This is the bit I find worrying, it's taken from their 'About' page:

'Top Quality Books: BookBub only features books that are bestsellers or written by bestselling authors and have received strong reviews from critics and readers.'

Are BookBub no longer featuring indies, or rising stars? Have the trad publishers elbowed the indies out?

[David]

I managed to get Imperfect Strangers accepted onto Bookbub a couple of years back, but only for the UK, priced at 99p as a countdown promotion. It was expensive and, consequently, nail-biting, but it's been by far my best promotion and covered the cost five-fold over the following couple of months.

I think the Trad publishers have made it harder to get accepted, Anna. And allowed for the cost to increase.

[Jim]

when the book that comes to me on email is a Lee Child, they're not pushing indies
I suspect Bookbub may have followed the money. Trad publishers are as desperate as anybody to get sales, and they might have piled in on Bookbub if it worked
And the numbers they're talking, a thousand dollars isn't a big deal

[Anna]

Yes, David and Jim, too right. I've had two books accepted (one twice) and one of those ads changed a book I thought was slowly dying into my star. I even had a 'Best Seller' banner for a few days. I am a huge fan of BookBub but those trad pubs have the money to fight their corner. All we indies can hope for is that BookBub help the little guys too.

I have been impressed by the fact that they actually do read the books they publish sufficiently well to suggest to me that I put my book in a different genre. And they're right. They have the expertise that I didn't have. I never know which genre suits my historical novels best. I could manage the Time Travel Romance - easy peasy. But the others are more difficult. That's my way of saying they'll have higher staff costs than most other enewsletter ads.

[Jim]

I can see that higher staff costs can make a difference. Some sites I suspect don't actually have staff costs, they're a one person operation
It's just that there's no way I can justify a thousand dollars

[Will]

They say that 'average sales' for a paid book are around 2000, maybe 2500. I'd like to see a proper spread of the results before coughing up a thousand dollars.

And why would anyone pay 600 dollars to have thousands of people be given a free book? I do understand the theory of 'first book free', but paying for that?

[Anna]

I was extremely lucky. I paid only $190 (only??!!) and I got my money back. I am very grateful for BookBub - and I'd be even more grateful if they'd let me advertise more with them!

If I remember rightly, I paid only $30 to advertise just in the UK when they first started in the UK. They seem to have changed things now.

@Will - No way would I pay that sort of money for a free book to be advertised.

@Jim - Right again, Jim, as far as I can see.

[Jim]

Moving away from Bookbub at this point, because I don't want to slag them off in an unjustifiable manner. The problem is that once upon a time we had 'vanity publishers.' Now when Amazon has massively undermined their business, we have 'vanity book promoters' and a whole heap of others who will promise to take your book and put it in front of millions.
Seriously, how many businesses are there that produce mailing lists to readers who've signed up for them? I'd guess scores.
How many of these emailed lists actually get looked at?
How many of them get looked through as opposed to having their first page glanced at?

We're back to selling shovels to prospectors as a business model again

[David]

As Jim has pointed out before, when a book really makes it big, it is hard copy that is selling rather than digital, because to really make it big the book has to be bought by the people who buy a book or two a year rather than a book or two a week, and these people mostly won't own Kindles. I doubt whether any e-Mail list will get through to them.

[Tim]

I submit to Bookbub every month . . . and get rejected every month. Which is fine in a sense, because rejection is cheap, and cheap is my middle name!

Of course, if they said yes, I'd have to stump up the cash! ($120 in my case). Be interesting to see what the results are - couldn't be worse than what I manage on my own, lol.

[Andrew]

I had a Bookbub promotion on Casanova towards the end of last year, and I had an incredible sales month as a result, selling about 3,500, and getting about a dozen new reviews.

But the cost of the promotion was such that I made about £400 profit from the deal, and a few short months later, I'm about where I was this time last year.

It's a powerful service, but it's not the game-changer it's sometimes billed to be.

Having said that, when you set up your author account, readers do have the option to "follow" you, and then they send out new release notifications to your followers. As these are presumably people who've already read one of your books, this feels like a list of warm leads to me.

So although my only Bookbub was a Casanova translation, a whopping 40 people will be getting an extra email about my zombie novella tomorrow... I hope one or two pick it up!