In order to reach readers most likely to purchase your books, you should run targeted marketing campaigns to an audience interested in your genre. BookBub’s partners have found great success running Featured Deals for this reason — they’re able to send their books to thousands or millions of members who’ve opted into receiving deals in their genre.
We regularly launch new categories at BookBub for many different reasons. Recently, we’ve been seeing an increasing demand to divide our main Mysteries list into more targeted sub-categories. After thorough testing, we’re excited to launch three new categories for Featured Deals: Crime Fiction, Cozy Mysteries, and Historical Mysteries. Introducing more targeted lists will create further opportunities for authors and publishers to have their books selected from a variety of subgenres, and will ensure our partners are reaching the readers who are truly interested in their content.
In this post, we’ll outline what types of content typically falls into each of these new categories. Since we have two related categories already on our roster — Thrillers and Supernatural Suspense — we’ll also explain how those lists differ from these new Mystery lists. Keep in mind that when we launch new categories, it can take some time to learn what our readers are looking for on each list.
1. Crime Fiction *new*
Books in our Crime Fiction category are propelled by a central crime and the process of solving that crime. This category can house police procedurals, hardboiled mysteries, detective fiction, and everything in between. This is a fairly broad category — books that used to run in our general Mysteries category that aren’t Cozies or Historicals will now run in Crime Fiction — and depending on performance we may continue to sub-divide the category in the future.
2. Cozy Mysteries *new*
Usually starring amateur sleuths, Cozy Mysteries are meant to be fun, light-hearted reads — the central crime or murder isn’t too dark or violent. The stories are filled with quirky, lovable characters, and plots often center around hobbies or activities like cooking, animal-rearing, and knitting.
3. Historical Mysteries *new*
Historical Mysteries are mysteries that take place in the past — usually at least 50 years ago.
4. Thrillers
Mysteries and Thrillers can overlap, but Thrillers aren’t “whodunits” — readers are often aware of exactly who the antagonists are from early on. Thrillers are set at a fast pace and can involve espionage, terrorism, the justice system, or psychological tension that keeps readers guessing.
5. Supernatural Suspense
Supernatural Suspense features suspenseful, mystery-driven plots with paranormal, magical, or supernatural elements. For example, psychic detectives are a successful trope in this category.
If you think one of your books is a good fit for one of these categories, submit your book for a Featured Deal.
*Note: If your book is selected for a Featured Deal, our editors will choose to run the deal to the category in which they think the book will perform best based on our readers’ tastes.
Want to share the news? Here’s a ready-made tweet:
Click to tweet: .@BookBub has launched new Mystery lists! See what they are – http://bit.ly/1LQuVUm #publishing
