Summer Sale Update
Hey Rebels!
It’s already been 10 days since our launch. Hard to believe right? On our side we have one of those time paradoxes happening where it feels like it was just yesterday and a few months ago at the same time. We’ve seen such an incredible response to Book Rebel from both our partners and our readers and we are more dedicated than ever to bringing the best book deals to the masses.
We’ve had readers shouting from the roof tops about how much they love Book Rebel (and not just the ones that won the Kindle Fires), and we’ve seen authors gain an amazing amount of traction as a result of their promotions. We know it’s only been 10 days, but Book Rebel already feels like a tremendous success thanks to your support. So once again, thank you from the entire Book Rebel Team.
PRODUCT UPDATE
We are always striving to make Book Rebel a more open and transparent platform that is guided by the needs of our readers and partners. We have been actively gathering feedback from our partners and today are excited to announce some cool new features that we feel helps us reach our goal of making Book Rebel the best author promotion platform on the planet.
The main thing we are excited to announce today is the ability to see live deal performance from within Book Rebel! I’m going to be using my own novel Freelancer as the example here as I was selected for a feature a few days ago (My books go through the same approval process and I pay the same prices as everyone else, for the record.)
Right on the partner dashboard you’ll be able to follow a link to view your promotion’s performance with a single click once it’s your deal’s feature date. Following that link will take you a details page which looks like this (curse you pinterest plugin for ruining screenshots!):
Pretty cool right? You’ll be able to view how many emails your book was included in and see the number of clicks broken down by time as they happen. We’re proud to be the only author platform that offers this level of live, transparent feedback (more to come in the future as well).
PROMOTION OUTCOMES
If you’re like me you are probably looking at that CPC number and trying to figure out exactly what that means. It’s a number that we use as one metric to help us figure out conversions (the actual results you care about) and it’s a number that is impossible to compare to interruptive unengaged marketing platforms such as Facebook. What we know is that our conversion numbers are WAY higher than what people typically see on Facebook.
And we know that it can be difficult to calculate the total ROI of a Book Rebel ad. Clicks can happen for days, backlog sales are common (we saw several features that were the first book in their series sell lots of full priced books later in the series), and we know that our readers tend to share the books they love, as they are avid readers.
Not only that, but we are the only newsletter service to officially support Kindle Unlimited. Due to the nature of KU it can be extremely difficult to know what a rough ROI is for months. Here is what my KU chart looked like the days before and the day of my promotion. Next to nothing to huge spike. (I’ll try to update this post in the future when I can see more data with page reads). But that number represents about 10 copies of my novel in page reads in a single day. (I’ve picked up 3 reviews already too, but no way to know if those came from Book Rebel or not).
To be honest, my promotion’s performance was well below average on the number of clicks for paid titles and was the worst performing ad of the day. We had a novel go out the same day that did more than 5x the amount of clicks for a paid title.
I didn’t mean to make this blog post about my promotions. So let’s move on real fast to our FREE title performance.
In short. It’s awesome.
This is what one of our “pre-launch” titles when didn’t even have the full subscriber lists settled yet looked like and we’ve had books do much better since. The CPC on our free titles has been crazy to see (surpassing what you can even get on Facebook for worse clicks, by the best Facebook ad experts.) Super compelling.
NEW PRICING
As I mentioned we actively look over ad performance every day and look at many factors from subscribers, to impressions, to clicks, to conversions, to page reads. We launched Book Rebel with what was our best guess of fair prices and we’ve been generally pleased with the value we’ve been able to provide at those prices.
However, we’re a data driven company, which is why today we are pleased to announce a new pricing table that includes a settled subscriber count (we were listening see!)
You’ll notice immediately the Summer Sale. But we’ll come back to that. =)
Most prices from launch have been unchanged. Some have increased. And some have actually decreased to where we are more confident the average promotion will be considered a success. If you booked a promotion (whether it’s run yet or not) at a higher price than this table represents, we’ve already credited your account with a corresponding amount of partner credit.
You’ll notice the number of readers referred is off (because we base that off of credit earned for now), but you’ll see my account has been credited with $5 for submitting during launch and $6 to make up for the lowered Teen and YA prices (bringing my CPC from above down quite a bit).
If you’ve booked a promotion where prices have gone up, your invoice amount will not be affected.
If you can’t tell, we REALLY value our partners.
A QUICK THOUGHT ON SUBSCRIBER COUNTS
Although we are sharing our subscriber counts, we are the only newsletter (that we know of) that is aiming to price based on engagement, not based on subscribers. While readers don’t have to worry about us giving them the boot if they miss some time engaging, authors don’t have to worry about paying for readers numbers that are inflated by inactive users. We do this because we understand the value of active versus inactive subscribers. This is why we are working diligently to base our price on conversion, rather than subscriber count.
FINALLY, THE SUMMER SALE
If you submit a promotion between now and July 7th (scheduled to run before September 7th), you’ll receive an automatic 25% discount on your invoice when your book is selected!
We’re calling it the summer sale, but really it’s just another way to thank our partners. You guys are incredible and we couldn’t do it without you.
Stay tuned!
