Does BookBub Sell Books? – Andrew Crofts
A couple of months ago I blogged about hiring Midas PR to garner a few reviews for my novella, “Secrets of the Italian Gardener”,
concluding that the resulting reviews added a few more bricks to the wall of the
book’s reputation, but were probably not going to result in many direct sales.
The next thought was to use the reviews to convince BookBub
that they should feature the book in their recommendations.
My publisher – the utterly wonderful Clare Christian at
RedDoor – made the approach to BookBub in September, but was turned down. In October she
tried again, perseverance being the only weapon we authors and publishers
ultimately have in our armoury, and they said okay.
If we were willing to drop the price of the book to 99 pence
in the UK , $1.50 in Canada and 65 rupees in India they
would try it out in those three markets for a few days. For that they would
charge US$90.
On the first morning of the promotion the Canadian version
went up from number 1,402,298 in the Amazon charts to number 27. India went from 397,840 to 605 and the UK from 198,000
to 618. There even seemed to be some knock-on effect in the US , with the
book climbing from around two millionth place to 48,516.
These seemed like exciting figures as they came in but, as
any dedicated watcher of Amazon charts will know, they did not indicate huge
sales. The book had dropped in recent months to selling only one or two copies
a day and, according to my agent, in the three days of the BookBub promotion
we sold a little over 200 copies, albeit at very reduced prices.
So, an interesting exercise, (that has more or less paid for
itself), and one more brick in that slowly rising wall. Next? An audio version,
read by an experienced actor, set up through Amazon’s ACX platform. I will keep
you posted on how the process goes.
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