Today we are presenting you with one of the best services for authors that exist online. BookBub is something all authors should be using when trying to reach a vast audience. It is extremely useful for both unproven and experienced authors. Let’s delve deeper into what is BookBub and how you can benefit from using this service.
What is BookBub?
Essentially, BookBub is a service for discovering books and authors. Since its founding in 2012, it gained millions of readers who use BookBub to discover new authors and their work.
Their easy-to-use interface enables readers to join BookBub for free and create accounts tailored to specific interests. Readers can choose their favorite genres and authors and get recommendations according to their preferences. BookBub provides personalized book recommendations, alerts on deals for books that match the reader’s interests, and updates from favorite authors.
At the same time, BookBub is highly beneficial to authors and publishers. They can sign up to BookBub partners, and then their books will be included when the customers get their emails.
The best thing is that BookBub is free for readers and very fair to authors. They take only a small fee from those transactions (books sold) made through their platform.
How BookBub Can Benefit Authors?
BookBub is a powerful marketing tool for both authors and publishers. They can use BookBub as a platform for the promotion of new releases or books that are currently on sale.
BookBub has an integrated mailing list that features millions of email addresses that are sent to their subscribers. This can significantly boost book sales, visibility, and reviews.
People are always looking for new reading suggestions, and if somebody were emailed your work from a respectable organization, their chances of buying it would be significantly increased.
One more advantage of BookBub is its personalized tools for promotion. You can use BookBub Ads (which will be explained later in the text) or BookBub New Release Alerts. With New Release Alerts, whenever an author published a new book, all users following that author will get an email notification. This can help drive early sales and reviews for the book.
The drawback of New Release Alerts is that authors can’t manually trigger or schedule these alerts. BookBub automatically sends those alerts based on the book’s on-sale date and the territories selected by the author or publisher.
Step-by-step Guide to Getting Your Books on BookBub
Getting your books on BookBub isn’t too difficult. Here’s an eight-step process for you:
- Create a BookBub Partner account on its dashboard
- Claim your Author Profile and fill it out with all necessary information (bio, photo, links to official site and social media)
- Wait for your request to be approved (this is usually a very fast process)
- Submit your books to your BookBub account
- Start building an audience and accumulating book reviews
- You can submit your book for a featured deal (at a discounted price or for free)
- Select options for your deal – fill out all promotion details
- Promote your BookBub deal through your website, personal mailing list, or social media accounts
Your submission may be unsuccessful but don’t be discouraged. BookBub has a strict policy about choosing proper books, so you can try again when you gain some authority. Regularly check for any updates or changes to the BookBub submission process.
Is BookBub Legit?
Yes, BookBub is completely legit, so you can be relaxed when using it. It’s a 100% trustworthy service that can help out self-published authors. To make money, it takes a commission on every purchase made. The whole process is transparent, so you can see where your money and the money of your readers go.
Using BookBub Ads
BookBud improved its services by adding a feature that is beneficial to most authors. They can now advertise their books to the audience and generate more sales and book reviews.
Authors can choose between several advertising options, depending on the goal of the campaigns. They can set up ads for increasing book sales, drive traffic to a website, boost eBook downloads, or raise brand awareness.
To successfully use this feature, you can do the following:
- Schedule targeted ads: BookBub allows you to target specific readers based on genre, author, or book interests. Define your target audience by selecting relevant genres or specific authors whose readers might be interested in your books.
- Any book: You can arrange to have ads running for literally any book (as long as it meets their very broad guidelines). It can be full price, on offer, part of a box set, or anything else.
- Define the budget and schedule your campaign
- Track and optimize: you can see various metrics via the BookBub dashboard and timely react if something about your ad campaign needs to be changed.
Using Similar Sites
You don’t need to stop on just one site. When you create an account on BookBub, you can seek similar sites and create a profile on them as well. Some of them are pretty similar to BookBub, but others have their specifics. Among sites similar to BookBub are:
Kindle Direct Publishing: If you want your book to appear on Kindle, this is the right website for your needs. Kindle services are provided by Amazon, the world’s largest ecommerce site. Getting your books listed on Kindle is always a great idea.
BookGorilla: This service is famous for the deals it offers to its subscribers. It is primarily oriented toward ebooks. When authors submit their books, they enter into the process of consideration. After the approval, BookGorilla lists its pieces inside the newsletter sent to the user base.
Lulu: Lulu is a platform for authors who wish to self-publish their work. Lulu prints work on demand and can make it much easier for authors to sell physical copies of their work. They also offer services to help authors with self-publishing ebooks.
Freebooksy: This is a platform for the promotion of free ebooks. You cannot monetize your work there, but you can reach a large audience of potential readers, which can be beneficial in the long term.
Kobo Writing Life: Kobo is a pretty interesting alternative to Kindle. Its user base is somewhat low right now, but its potential is very high. Also, it is always a good idea to publish your work wherever you can. You never know where you can get popular.
Using BookBub alongside other platforms will enable you quite a large online presence. The rest is on you. If you are a quality author, you will achieve high sales of your books. Of course, you can use advertising channels every now and then to boost your sale performance.
Conclusion
As you can see, using BookBub brings many benefits to authors. So, if you are not already using it, now is the right time to create an account and advertise your work. Whether you’re an established author with a bit of money to put behind marketing or a complete newbie looking for some more exposure, it could definitely be the way to go.
The initial costs of using a BookBub are significantly low, so there is no excuse just to try it out. You can’t lose much, but can gain a lot.
Happy publishing!