I landed a BookBub featured deal about a month ago for my mystery novel, What Grows From the Dead. I’ll abbreviate the book as WGFTD for ease in typing from here on out. BookBub featured deals are competitive – I’ve been applying for them for five years since my first novel came out, and I only started landing them last year, despite applying with most of my books every month. This was my sixth, my second world-wide (as opposed to just non-US markets), and my first free deal (a giveaway). Because it was a deal for free books, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the hefty price tag, $712, because I wouldn’t earn any direct income from the books being claimed and downloaded.
Still, every other BookBub has either made me a positive return on book sales or come close, and they’ve all had a big response, so I decided to try it out.
Costs
I had five days I could set the book for free. I decided to use the BookBub promotion as my first-day promo and then add other book newsletter announcements afterwards. This is called “stacking” – doing announcements on successive days to keep your book being downloaded by new people, to make the most of your promo. I’ve seen a number of people recommend this, although I have no way to test if it’s better or worse than just one big announcement, or putting all your announcements the same day, but I figure I’ll listen to people smarter than I am. I set up the following announcements with the following costs:
| Day | Site | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | BookBub | $712 |
| 2 | FreeBooksy | $100 |
| 3 | Book Adrenaline | $30 |
| 3 | Book Cave | $49 |
| Total | $891 | |
These are all promo sites I’ve had some luck with for giveaways in the past. I also ran a set of smaller free newsletter announcements through KDROI, a Firefox plugin I bought a while ago that submits to about 30 smaller newsletters for free.
So, let’s go with an $891 total cost.
Results: Downloads
The results of my five-day free giveaway period were way beyond what I expected. I’ve done free giveaways before, promoted with FreeBooksy and other stacked promos, and I’ve had never more than about 5000 downloads, often more like 2000 or 3000. For this one, with BookBub, I had 20,000 downloads on the first day, and a little over 30,000 overall over the five days. Here’s how it looks for that one book with the others stripped out (they weren’t free, so they don’t show up here even though it says All 10 books).
To put that in context, for all my books, over five years, I had about 47,000 downloads. In five days, I got another 30,000, all of one book. Here’s how that looks on my Amazon history graph, with the blue bar at right being this five-day giveaway.
Note: The vast majority of these “units processed,” 93% of them, are free giveaways run at various times over five years. I only have about 5500 actual sales, and a good chunk of those (maybe 3000) are from $0.99 promos.
So, I definitely moved a ton of books. A crap ton, if I might be so bold. And that earned me precisely zero dollars. However, there were some other benefits to doing this. These are benefits I expected, but I had no idea what the magnitude of them would be.
Results: Page Reads
The primary way I was going to make a return on this promotion was through page reads in Kindle Unlimited. I’ve chosen to put all my books but two (my children’s book from 1998, which is traditionally published, and my promo novella, which I use as a reader magnet) in Kindle Unlimited, and it generally makes up about 2/3 of my total income from the books any given year.
The page reads for What Grows From the Dead soared as the promo got going. This has happened for me in the past with other free promos. I’m not entirely sure of the mechanism for this, but I think it’s an algorithmic response within Amazon’s system and/or with readers. My book certainly jumped to the top of the main Amazon rankings for free books (see below) and to the top of its categories (mystery/thriller, cozy mystery). So, anybody searching for a book like this (or, actually, for any book at all) probably had a much easier time finding it while it was famous from all the downloads.
Here’s what’s happened with the page reads. I included a good chunk of June to show a before and after. The teal blue is the promoted book. The growth in page reads starts up on June 28th (the first day of the giveaway) and then peaks from July 2-8, and then starts to drift down.
There’s a little bit of read-through to my other books as well, although not a ton, which you can see if I take out WGFTD:
The book that gets the clearest boost is Got Trouble, in red on the bottom graph, which makes sense – it’s the closest match in genre to WGFTD, so the next logical one of my books to read. I think it’s fair to say that nearly all of my other books (epic fantasy and sci fi) do a little better following the Jun 28 promo.
Results: Rankings
When you do a promoted free giveaway, you’re looking for a jump in rankings. WGFTD got that, reaching as high as the #2 overall free book on Amazon, and the top mystery and cozy mystery, a status that lasted for a couple of days. Once your book is no longer free, it blinks back to the paid book rankings, which don’t include all the free downloads, so your sales rank plummets back to about where it was before the promotion, maybe boosted a bit from follow-on sales after the promotion from recommendations or other readers who notice it.
However, the Sales Ranks listed on the book’s public-facing Amazon page aren’t the whole story. On your Author Central dashboard, you can go to the Reports + Marketing tab and see your book’s sales rank history. This is clearly some kind of amalgamation between free and paid sales, plus maybe KU page reads, because it doesn’t have a sharp drop-off after the book switches back to paid. So, it’s a kind of overall ranking, although I have no idea what the math behind it is. Here’s what WGFTD’s sales rank looks like over the past four months since publication:
You can see the clear and sustained spike at the right side as the promo begins, staying high for a while afterward.
One problem with these graphs is that they don’t have a consistent Y axis scale, so it can be hard to compare one book to another. WGFTD has a broad scale, going to 1.25 million at the bottom. You can see a bit of a response following the June 28th promo in the rankings of my thriller, Got Trouble, but note this graph only goes down to 1 million at the base, so it’s a bit more stretched out than the previous one.
None of my other books show a clear June 28th inflection, so the carryover ranking effect for them is likely small, maybe within the noise of individual sales for those books. That’s what I think those sharp peaks are on the graphs – individual sales, or maybe page-read clusters, that peak and then get smoothed back to baseline.
One thing to note here is that I haven’t promoted these two mystery/thriller books in many other ways this year. I’ve done essentially no promo for Got Trouble, and I’ve done a GoodReads giveaway (which seems to have had no effect on sales rank or on much else) and a small LibraryThing giveaway for WGFTD earlier this year, plus some promo for the release on March 9th, but no ads or anything else. So, whatever’s happening on the right end of these ranking graphs is almost certainly from the BookBub free promo.
Results: Sales
There was a little bit of sales activity for the book during and following the giveaway, probably in response to the high ranking, or maybe some word-of-mouth from people who read it right away. As you can see below, where WGFTD is yellow, I only had one sale in June prior to the promo, and afterward, I have 16, two of them paperbacks that were bought during the promo itself. This isn’t a huge return cash-wise, as I only make about $2.75 per book sold, but it’s definitely a bump. Call it $40-45.
Results: Ratings and Reviews
The other big boost from having so many books out there is that people actually read them and offer reviews. This isn’t a cash return on my promo investment, but I think it’s still important. I should have made better notes, but I think WGFTD was at about 35 ratings on Amazon before the promo with maybe 15 written reviews. On Goodreads, you can go back and track those stats on your author dashboard, but they don’t match the page exactly, and it’s hard to know why. I think I had about 30 ratings on GoodReads and 25 reviews.
As of right now, I’m at 334 ratings, 29 written reviews on Amazon, and 226 ratings, 38 reviews on Goodreads.
So, if we’re willing to assign all of these new ratings to the promo, which is probably not exactly true but is mostly true, it looks like this:
| Site & Type | Before promo | After promo | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon ratings | 35(?) | 334 | +299 |
| Amazon reviews | 15(?) | 29 | +14 |
| Goodreads ratings | 35(?) | 226 | +181 |
| Goodreads reviews | 25(?) | 38 | +13 |
So, there’s been a tremendous increase in ratings on both platforms and a smaller but still significant increase in written reviews, both of which offer reader testimony as to the book’s quality. The readers you reach in a free giveaway like this aren’t likely to be as attuned to your work as the fans who find your books as they come out, so you’d expect the ratings to drop with this wider, less die-hard audience. That happened a bit, although not by a lot – WGFTD was about a 4.6 on each platform before the promo, and it’s now down around 4.5 on each. Interestingly, most of the new responses were ratings-only, not written, which is different from the readers I generally attract, who are more likely to write a review when they rate.
As a bottom line, in under three weeks, WGFTD has now exceeded the number of ratings for my most popular book, the epic fantasy detective story Flames Over Frosthelm that’s been out since 2019.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
As I’ve shown above, I have some degree of economic return on my investment in this promo from page reads and increased sales. I also have intangible returns in the form of higher sales rank and more visibility on Amazon, more ratings and reviews, and more readers who’ve now experienced one of my books and might get a nudge when I release another (or, if I’m lucky, might follow me and eagerly await a next release). It’s very hard to put a dollar value on those intangible returns, so let’s skip that and see how the world of cold, hard cash looks.
To do that, I’m going to attempt to figure out what my baseline book income was before the promo. Using KDP’s Royalties Estimator, that looked like this for about three weeks prior to the promo:
That averages out to about $6.94 per day, composed of sales and KU page reads.
After the promo, it looks like this:
That averages out to about $37.17 per day, with the majority of it being KU page reads of WGFTD.
If I subtract out the $6.94 per day baseline and multiply by 22 days since the promo started, I get $30.23 x 22 = $665.08.
By that math, I’ve lost $891 – $665 or $226 on the promo. A net loss. However, the revenue hasn’t stopped – I’ll bet my page reads stay elevated for a bit longer, although it’s hard to know how long. That will help close the gap, as will sales from word-of-mouth recommendations or the higher sales rank I now enjoy.
Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
