As almost everyone in publishing knows by now, BookBub is the Holy Grail of book promotion, and getting your book selected for a BookBub Featured Deal is like winning a Super Bowl: you feel like there should be a parade with confetti, crowds shouting your name, fireworks, and more.
Why? Because BookBub gets results. I don’t mean results like selling a few more than the average number of copies. I’m talking about results that launch you onto Best Seller lists. (In fact, a lot of authors use BookBub deals to make a run at Best Seller status – and why not? It’s probably the best shot they’re going to get.) But I digress…
As many people will tell you, it’s difficult to land a BookBub Featured Deal; they are very selective about the books they promote, so the odds are that submissions will be rejected more often than not. I was fortunate in that I got a BookBub the very first time I submitted – so I homered the first time at bat, so to speak. However, that was several years ago. The book I submitted then was Sensation, the first novel in my Kid Sensation series. You can read about the results here, but the gist is that the book vaulted to #1 in numerous categories, as well as #329 overall in the Paid Kindle Store. (Just for purposes of clarity, it should be understood that there is also a separate Kindle list for books that are available for free vs those that require purchase.)
You would think at that point I’d be completely on the BookBub bandwagon, and I was to a certain extent. They certainly got stellar results, but I wasn’t as sold on book marketing/promotion back then. In essence, I went the first few years after publishing Sensation with a bare minimum of advertising, but was blessed in that my books did really well. I sold 10,000 books in something like the first 6 months, and 25,000 in a little over a year. Again, that was with almost no advertising.
Fast forward a few years, and the indie publishing landscape has changed significantly. You pretty much have to advertise these days in order to get and maintain visibility. Heck, there are people who dominate the charts and sell thousands of copies per day, and even they feel the need to advertise. Long story short, almost everyone is promoting their work to some extent, and BookBub is the platform most of them (me included) set their sights on.
Cutting right to the chase, my scifi novel Terminus – after many submissions and rejections – was finally accepted for a BookBub with a promo date of July 21, 2019. Terminus is the first novel in my Fringe World series and has done well in terms of sales, having broken into the Top 10 of numerous categories after its release several years ago. It has continued to perform respectably, and I was practically turning cartwheels when I received notice that it had been accepted.
As expected, the day of the promo brought gobs of sales. I had discounted the book from its regular price of $3.99 to $0.99 in all markets, which meant that I would get a 35% royalty on sales instead of 70%. (My book is in Kindle Unlimited, but rather than tap dance around and try to get the 70% in some places via a Countdown Deal – and perhaps screw something up – I just went the simple route. A bird in the hand, as they say…)
Oddly enough, although sales were coming in at a healthy clip, the book’s ranking on Amazon did not change. Turns out that the rankings on Amazon.com were frozen for the bulk of the day, with Terminus stuck at something like 23,000 in the Paid Kindle Store. It was a bit frustrating because the rankings were not frozen in other countries like the UK and Canada, which saw Terminus move up and take the #1 spot in numerous categories. Eventually the rankings “thawed” (for lack of a better term), and I was ultimately rewarded with this:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #191 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#2 in Space Exploration Science Fiction eBooks
#1 in Galactic Empire Science Fiction eBooks
#2 in Space Marine Science Fiction
The #191 was the best overall ranking that I saw the book attain, but strangely enough I claimed more #1 rankings in categories with a lower overall rank:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #231 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#1 in Space Exploration Science Fiction eBooks
#1 in Exploration Science Fiction
#1 in Colonization Science Fiction eBooks
Also cool were the author rankings, which saw me get s high as #25 in Science Fiction:
Amazon Author Rankbeta
#25 in Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
#50 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction
#63 in Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy
However, the most awesome thing of the day was probably this:
I’m a big Game of Thrones fan (read all the books) and a big Wild Cards fan (the superhero series edited by GRRM – I read the first 15 books), so ranking right next to him was like…Wow!
All in all, it was a fantastic experience. As you can tell, BookBub is essentially a kingmaker, so it’s completely understandable why many writers salivate over getting a promo with them. I ultimately sold over 1200 copies of Terminus – somewhat less than the BookBub average, but with sell-through, page reads and audiobook sales, I came out ahead. Would I do it again? Let’s just assume that’s a rhetorical question…
This was an interesting look at the book promotion process. Many authors mention promotions, some even then beg the fans to go out and do it in lieu of doing it themselves it feels like, but few put down the kind of information you just did. I think it was a nice look at a slice of what an author has to go through to be even somewhat successful and presumably a good signpost for budding authors.
In terms of marketing, the contrast between today’s environment and when I started publishing my fiction is startling. “Sensation” got published and went to #1 in its category with pretty much no marketing. It’s not impossible that it could happen today, but it would be incredibly difficult. I mean, the need for visibility is so great that marketing/promotion is almost a bigger deal than the actual writing: Facebook ads, Amazon ads, mail lists, newsletter swaps…
In short, the business of writing really requires that you treat it like a business these days. It takes time away from actually putting words on paper, but it’s a necessity and authors have to try to find that balance if they want to achieve success.
Are you ever going to try your hand at other fields? I think it would be interesting to see you write some Xianxia/Xuanhuan or some LitRPG. It would be nice to see a solid author who isn’t tied down by all the standard tropes have a go at the different genres.
First, let me say that I’m incredibly flattered that you consider me a solid author who could do well in various genres. That said, I actually do have a ton of works-in-progress for new series that I need to finish, and I’ve posted excerpts from a couple. Some of them don’t entirely fit my brand, however, so those will get published under pen names. However, there are plenty that could bear having “Kevin Hardman” on the cover, and a couple of them contain elements of Xianxia. However, I’d probably have to modify them culturally to some extent to make them fit under that heading.
As to LitRPG, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, I love role-playing games (I’ve written about my addiction to the Fallout series before), and obviously writing is right up my alley. Thus, it would seem to be a natural fit. (And again, I probably have a WIP that could be tweaked slightly to make it into a LitRPG novel.)
Unfortunately, as always, my handicap here is time. Basically, I need a schedule with enough flexibility to flesh out my other stories. At the moment, however, the bulk of my readers want more Kid Sensation, more Fringe Worlds and more Warden. Bearing that in mind, I have to feed the beast, to a certain extent, if I want continued success in this business.
In short, I do plan to release novels in other genres, but I don’t have a firm timetable for them.