Have you heard of BookBub before? If not, it’s lucky that you stumbled upon this article, because it is an immensely useful service that all authors should be using. If you want to to raise awareness of your work and find out about other budding authors like yourself, then it would definitely be worth your time to start an account with BookBub.
What is BookBub?
BookBub is a service which is beneficial to readers and writers alike. People can sign up to be given a daily email notification about books that are available on special offer. Customers choose the genre of fiction they are most interested in (or the type of book, if they want nonfiction) and then the email provides them with appropriate titles.
On the other side of the equation, authors and publishers sign up to become BookBub partners and then their books will be included when the customers get their emails. BookBub make money from this whole process by taking a small commission from the price of each book sold as a result of their services.
How BookBub Can Benefit Authors?
The most obvious way that BookBub can help authors is by sending book offers customers who have an expressed an interest in your genre. 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. Obviously, the more readers you can get, the better. But that’s not all.
To be a good writer, you also have to be a good reader. If you don’t read widely, you won’t really be able to cultivate your own writing style. If you just use BookBub without even thinking of your own work, you’ll find that you could be exposed to lots of authors you’d otherwise never have heard of. Who knows what stories they might inspire you to write?
Getting Your Books on BookBub
Getting your books on BookBub isn’t too difficult. Here’s a five step process for you:
- Create an account on the BookBub Partner Dashboard
- You must then claim your Author Profile
- After this, you just need to wait for your request to be approved
- Once the approval comes through, you can fill in all of your author details
- Now you can add all of your books to your BookBub account
Is BookBub Legit?
You’ve no need to worry about BookBub. It’s a 100% trustworthy service that can help out self-published authors. In order to make money, it takes a commission on every purchase made. There’s nothing underhanded or unusual about the process.
Using BookBub Ads
BookBub has recently expanded its services in order to offer more to authors. The BookBub Ads feature means that books will be advertised to an even larger number of people. Here’s an overview of the features included:
- Targeted Ads: If you use BookBub, you can target people based on their interest in authors, genres, publishers and more. Using the logic of “If you like X, then you’ll love Y” you can get your ads seen by those who are most likely to want to read your book
- 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
- Personalized Budgeting and Scheduling: If you’re working to a very specific budget or need the ads to run at a very particular time, you can easily arrange for it to meet your exact criteria
It’s a comprehensive advertising service and it’s sure to be appropriate for any authors with a slightly larger budget to put towards promoting their work.
Using Similar Sites
BookBub is one of many sites that upcoming authors might find beneficial. If you’re using these other sites, BookBub could really help to boost your efforts. Here are four other things to try:
- Kindle Direct Publishing: You can use this service in order to make your books available on Kindle. Kindle services are provided by Amazon, the world’s largest ecommerce site. Getting your books out there would be a great idea
- Kobo Writing Life: Kobo is an alternative to Kindle. Not quite so many people use it, but it’s worth getting your work out there on as many different platforms as possible. The easier you make it for people to access your work, the better
- Lulu: Lulu is a platform for authors who wish to self-publish their work. They print 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
If you used BookBub alongside all of these other services, you’d have quite a large online presence as an author. Then you just need to make sure that you’ve got a good cover to complement your high quality writing and you’ll have a high quality product out there.
So if you’re not using BookBub yet, you should really think about signing up. 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. As there’s very little investment required to get started with BookBub, you’ve very little to lose by giving it a try.