Fed up with the radio silence to your book marketing efforts on social media?
Wish you could get more responses from potential readers each time you plug your new work?
Then look to book promotion services to supplement your marketing campaign. The web holds hundreds of sites you never knew about that could successfully expose you to more readers and win you more fans if you approach them properly.
Book Promo Sites
These book promotion services can help you sell more of your published works. For free or at cost, they feature your book in front of their vast email lists and showcase it on their social media pages as well.
This means frequent book sales, downloads and high chart rankings for you, freebies and discounts for the readers and a solid reputation for the promotion sites. Winners all around.
But, to the discerning indie author, only the top ten sites will do.
The elite list places the sites with the most traffic at the very top while those with the least occupy the bottom.
Their placements are based on a metric published by Alexa Internet analytics to measure the popularity of a website. Also known as Alexa Rank, it competes with Google Rank.
Millions of sites make the Alexa Rank list. The lower your Alexa rank, the more popular your site — namely, your author site — is.
This translates into more value for your dollar. For instance, a book promotion site that commands $50 for their services but garners no traffic is definitely a no return on investment for you.
An essential feature of these promotion services is their knack for helping you locate readers easily.
Instead of fretting over whether someone will read your Tweet or Facebook post or purchase your book, you can access a huge site and expose your work to hundreds of thousands or millions of readers who are eager to receive it.
Now that’s slick book marketing!
These sites, however, only promote eBooks, not printed copies or audiobooks.
You must have your book in eBook format first on Amazon Kindle and on sale on another e-retailer such as Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and Google Play before you can start to promote your printed or audio editions.
Why Only Ten?
Again, hundreds of such sites exist but only a fraction are worth your while.
The vast majority cannot deliver more than a dozen sales of your book and some have been reputed to yield nothing if you experiment with them.
As a result, a list that exceeds 100 sites may not be worth your while since most would waste both your money and your time.
The Cost of Book Promotion Services
Each site follows its own pricing policy and authors make the mistake of choosing a site based on price.
This tactic will lead you to spend more than you should and certainly not to more sales.
The best sites will maintain a record of each book promotion they take on and analyze the actual cost per sale.
How much you spend on book promotion services is immaterial: it’s the cost in relation to the results you get that truly counts.
If you pay more than $2 per sale for a 99 cent or free book with a book promotion site, you are being cheated because you cannot earn revenue paying $2 to sell a 99 cent book on which you can only collect 70 cents in royalties.
Book Promo Sites Yield New Reads
Readers flock to book promotion sites because they are constantly seeking out new books. Many sign up for newsletters and follow sites to receive updates for new releases or for special deals.
A useful tip for authors is to book a promotion with the best sites, which tend to serve every genre and niche, and then to search for sites that aim for readers of your specific categories.
The Web holds several sites that specialize in particular genres and niches that can provide you with between 10 to 100 sales and these can help promote your book with adequate pricing.
The Top Ten Book Promotion Sites
The following ten book promotion sites receive top billing for serving indie authors and providing them with optimum value for their works.
1 . BookBub — a global book service counted as the most dominant, among the most expensive, and among the hardest to join in the industry but exceptional in the quality of its offerings.
BookBub sends daily emails to millions of its reader-subscribers about new releases it sells. It provides what it calls “featured deals” or “featured new release” programs on discounted books as well as free eBooks by category. Its readers sign up only for the categories they want and choose their favorite retailers.
The service operates its book promotions on Amazon’s Kindle Store — the largest in the industry — Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook.
It also offers promotion by region, most especially in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and Australia.
On promotion day, BookBub averages 300 to 500 extra sales in new books.
To become a member, you open a BookBub Partner account, claim an author profile and apply for one of the “featured deals” or “featured new releases” through an “author dashboard.”
Even then, the service does not guarantee membership as it only accepts 10 to 15 percent of books submitted for deals in the United States.
Categories include advice and how-to, African American interest, biographies and memoirs, business, Christian nonfiction, cooking, general nonfiction, history, parenting, politics and current events, religion and spirituality, science and true crime.
As an example of a success story, one book, Is This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt from publisher Workman’s Algonquin, had a listing with BookBub with several online retailers along with social media and blog support on Workman’s page. The result was a first-time inclusion on the New York Times bestseller list.
2. BGSAuthors of BooksGoSocial — a book promotion service registered in Ireland in November 2013 with staff on three continents, all working by remote from home to provide 24-hour support.
The company opens its services with a video call or phone call with you to discuss your promotional plan. Its personnel replies to nearly all emails within 24 hours of receipt.
BGSAuthors advertises books on Amazon, Facebook and by email to over 150,000 readers and their own social media channels to over 750,000.
Most of the company’s promotions includes a three-month membership with monthly emails, blog post promotions and access to review networks, most especially, NetGalley, and support.
It is among the few promotion services offering a 60-day month back guarantee if you as a customer are not satisfied with their offerings.
The company offers multiple packages such as Silver, Gold, and Platinum tiers but the most basic one provides Amazon ads, book descriptions, social media promotion, and a NetGalley place for a month.
It provides no-strings-attached cash grants to authors and small publishers to help where possible.
In one of several reviews of BGS‘ services, one author, James Alan McGettigan, praised the publisher for its affordability and thorough editing of his first book, The Altered Moon, and for turning his work into an artistic success.
3. The Fussy Librarian — a book marketing site with a Facebook page hosting more than 20,000 fans and an equally influential mailing list.
The company market a wide range of categories and their prices range from $10 to $65. As an author you may have to book your work a month in advance for the most popular categories because they flood the company’s schedule quickly.
The Fussy Librarian accepts one book for up to two categories at a time. If you follow this policy, you gain a 50 percent discount on the cheaper of the two submissions.
The company requires that your book have a minimum of 10 reviews, a 4.0 rating on Amazon or 20 reviews and a 3.5 rating.
If your work has 10 reviews between Amazon’s branch locations in, for example, the United States or the United Kingdom, it still makes the cut. Reviews on non-Amazon sites like Goodreads do not count.
Bargain Booksy — a book promotion service as a division of Written Word Media, which provides free eBooks, assistance with new releases, books in Kindle Unlimited, and audiobooks.
The company averages 30 to 40 additional sales in books on the day of the promotion. It is considered among the industry’s more affordable and less complex book promotion services.
Its nonfiction categories number only three. They include cookbook and nutrition, self-help, and how-tos and general nonfiction.
To participate as a new author, your book should be priced between 99 cents and $5, number more than 50 pages and comply with the company’s editorial review standards.
While there is no set number of reviews required, Bargain Booksy may refund your money if it finds your work does not adhere to its requirements.
5. BookSends — a book promotion service that averages 20 to 30 additional sales in new books on promotion day.
The company specializes only in nonfiction and does not categorize the different subgenres it covers. Its reader-subscribers number 30,500.
Promotional costs depend on your book’s sale price: $40 for 99-cent books; $60 for $1.99 books; $80 for $2.99 books, and $75 for free books.
BookSends also provides two services known as “Expand Your Audience” and multiple Facebook-related options.
To take part, your book ought to be on Amazon’s Kindle, have at least Amazon reviews with a “high overall average,” contain an appealing cover design, hold a 50 percent discount and cost less than $3.
Additionally, to qualify, your book cannot be a novella or short-story collection.
Even if you satisfy all criteria, BookSends reserves the right to disqualify your book on the grounds of caliber, subject matter, or a lack of space in its company newsletter.
6. ManyBooks — a book promotion service that averages 10 to 20 additional sales in new books on promotion day.
ManyBooks also provides special promotions for free books, reader reviews and editorial reviews. Services cost $29.
To be accepted for a newsletter promotion, your book must be on Amazon, have an average rating of four stars or higher, have a professional cover, have a riveting book description, hold a 50 percent discount, or be free or hold the best deal for this work in the last three months.
7. K(indle)BookPromotions.com — a somewhat pricey book promotion site whose simplest promotion plan costs $140 but affords you a five percent discount on any marketing package with its coupon code when you submit your book.
KBookPromotions has two particularly popular packages.
One is its “Three-Week Review Express” package to place your book in front of its most active reviewers, typically resulting between 10 to 30 reviews as readers finish your work.
The other is the “Two Day Best Seller Promotion” package to secure more sales for your book and rank higher on Amazon’s bestsellers list, which does not fetch your book more reviewers than the previous package.
To take part, your book ought to be on Kindle, have at least Amazon reviews with a “high overall average,” contain an appealing cover design, hold a 50 percent discount and cost less than $3.
KBookPromotions’ readership includes a great many authors, reviewers, and bloggers — among the highest percentage in the industry. The readers also tend to post reviews on their own sites, Amazon, and Goodreads, which means that your book is highly likely to be reviewed.
As do most quality sites, the company does not list every book that they receive from authors but rather makes sure that the submissions undergo a manual review process to determine their fitness for their readership.
8. Free Kindle Books and Tips — Also known by the acronym FKBT, it is also informally referred to as the “Home of the #1 subscription Amazon Kindle blog.”
If you elect to advertise with Free Kindle, your book will be placed before 675,000 Kindle readers.
About 600,000 of them will read the blog through a free reader app or the Collections app for their Kindle Fire and another 150,000 will access an e-Ink Kindle subscription, email, social media, a blog’s website or a RSS reader.
Prices range from $25 to $200 for an exclusive option to have your own book post rather than share it with other works by other authors.
Related book promotions include Just Kindle Books, Kindle Book Promo and New Free Kindle Books.
9. Ereader News Today — a major book promotions site with a Facebook following of 500,000 fans.
The company’s e-book promotion pricing ranges from $25 to $110, depending on the size and complexity of your book’s marketing package requirements.
Ereader has a list of promotional requirements that forbids erotica and insists that your book contain at least 125 pages, except for children’s books or cookbooks.
They also have a Christian fiction section that provides generously for authors of this genre. If your book falls in this category, then you will be among the site’s better-served customers.
Ereader advertises on Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, Apple iBooks, GooglePlay, Walmart’s Kobo eReader and Sony Reader.
10. Freebooksy — a book promotion website primarily for free books that works with both independent and traditionally published authors.
Freebooksy’s prices range from $40 for small categories of at least 30,000 subscribers such as children’s books to $100 for their largest genres such as mystery, thrillers, and romance.
The company has a large Facebook page with more than 250,000 fans with whom it will share your book for its particular genre.
Freebooksy is reputed for approving most submissions. However, as an author, you have to schedule to do so about a week ahead of time to make sure you can secure the promotional date you want most. You may wait even longer for a popular genre that you wish to promote your work with.
Additionally, since the onset of the pandemic, the company has been changing its price range from $65 to $230, especially to expand its offerings to provide series promotions on Amazon pages with multiple discounts on your first book if it is free. This offer applies to the categories of thrillers, romance, horror, paranormal, and nonfiction.
