For all of 2025, like many indie authors, I struggled to get reviews. I struggled with sales. And above all else, I struggled with marketing. I considered discounting my book and using BookBub Featured Deals to help drive visibility, though I’d heard advice that I should finish my series before I applied for the promotion to generate more sales from read-through. I decided to apply anyway because I wanted to set a strong foundation for the series.
Much to my surprise, that risk paid off in a major way, and pushed me to build the marketing strategy I’d been missing.
I received the unexpected acceptance from BookBub before I had a plan in place, and with the clock ticking, I used everything I learned about how other authors maximized the impact of their own Featured Deals to put together a solid marketing strategy quickly. My biggest goal was to get as many eyes on the book as possible, and I would have been ecstatic to earn half of what the promotion cost me. During the week of the promotion, I sold 815 books at $0.99, generated $604 in royalties, and saw over 20,000 Kindle pages read — propelling my book to #6 in the Dragons category and a #449 overall rank in the Kindle Store.
Here’s how I did it.
Building the Foundation: Pre-Promo Strategy
Knowing that hundreds of titles are submitted to BookBub each day, I knew simply submitting my book as it was would not be enough. While the book itself was well-received by readers, I felt as if its description did not meet the standards of the top-performing titles in my genre.
I had fallen into a common trap: I was writing a description as an author enamored with my world’s lore, rather than as a marketer aiming to capture a reader’s interest. While that information meant a lot to me, it didn’t do much to effectively hook a potential reader. By stripping away the dense backstory and focusing on immediate emotional stakes, I stopped over-explaining my book and started selling it. The differences are significant, and I believe these changes played a major role in my acceptance for a Featured Deal.
Once I had a good idea of how to structure my book description, I rewrote it to align more closely with current market trends, prioritizing character motivation, central conflict, and stakes over world-building and backstory. The old description was too wordy, bland, and generic; it was just a summary of what happens in my book.
With my description finalized, I used keyword research tools to identify the best search keywords for my book. While these keywords aren’t used in BookBub’s vetting strategy, this was part of a broader effort to improve the chances of my book showing up in Amazon’s search results. I also changed my book’s categories on Amazon to better reflect the overall change in tone with my new description. I reasoned that if my book was selected, it would see far more organic sales than if I had left my old keywords and categories in place.
When everything was ready, I submitted my book for consideration. Between the free and discounted book options, I chose the $0.99 promotion for the United States in the Romantasy category. This option made the most sense for my situation, as a free promotion, in my opinion, is best suited for those who have already finished their series or have a backlist of books.
Building a Marketing Strategy
To my sheer astonishment, my submission was approved in just over an hour. With about a week and a half to prepare for the big day, I had to come up with a marketing strategy, and fast! I researched how other authors structured their BookBub promotions to maximize their sales, and once I was armed with ideas, I got to work. Following BookBub’s advice on how long to discount a book to hit a bestseller list, I opted to let the promotion run for a full week.
With my book in Kindle Unlimited, I scheduled a Kindle Countdown Deal, which allowed me to retain my 70% royalty rate. This was crucial: If I had gone wide with my ebook, I would have been forced to manually drop my price from $3.99 to $0.99, making me eligible only for the 35% royalty rate.
I also wanted to use the Featured Deal in tandem with other promotional tools to maintain as high a rank on Amazon’s bestseller lists as I could. In order to keep my momentum going, I secured promotions from two other paid newsletters, scheduled two days apart. While BookBub shared my book to fans of romantasy, the other newsletters shared it to fans of fantasy — I had both major genres of my novel covered.
To raise awareness on social media, I hosted a giveaway for one signed paperback copy of my book on Instagram, launching it five days before my BookBub promo went live and scheduling it to end when the promo launched.
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As I started gaining followers, I revealed my Featured Deal acceptance mid-giveaway to generate hype, and when the giveaway ended, I reminded my followers that the deal was live. To amplify the deal’s reach further, I created promotional graphics highlighting the deal and my book’s tropes, which I used in paid ads and organic social posts throughout the week.
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In this example carousel, the first image was meant to hook potential readers, while the second was meant to lock them in. I included a few standard tropes, then focused on niche tropes to make the book stand out. After seeing a lot of authors use the “$0.99 BookBub Featured Deal!” hook, I used that at the top of both my primary text and on the graphic itself, then shared prime snippets of Goodreads reviews and finished with a call to action.
All of this preparation played a significant role in both my acceptance for the Featured Deal and my book’s overall performance.
The Results: Short- and Long-Term Impact
While most promotions show a steady drop-off after the first day, I was surprised to see a small uplift in sales on January 30 and 31. Further investigation revealed my book was shown in BookBub’s email for trending deals of the week — those emails highlight the top 10 ebook deals in the genres readers are subscribed to. My book also appeared for a few days on the front page of BookBub’s website under Most Popular Deals in readers’ categories, adding another layer of organic visibility.
The longer-term impact was just as encouraging. Before the promotion, my stats were pretty average for a debut romantasy with no backlist — $308.97 in royalties, 30.8k pages read, and 75 total books sold. In the month of February alone, I increased my daily royalties by 6.8x, my daily pages read by 12x, and my daily books sold by 4x. I also received 21 new ratings on Goodreads and 26 on Amazon. With nearly 33k Kindle pages read in February, I blew past my entire pre-promo lifetime total — and even with the cost of all the promos, ads, and giveaway factored in, I came out with close to $100 in profit.
Beyond the sales, the most unexpected result was being approached by Podium Entertainment, one of the biggest audiobook publishers in the industry. I am delighted to announce I have partnered with them to produce audiobooks not just for book one, but also for books two and three — truly beyond my wildest dreams. The visibility from this promotion, and the strategy I built around it, opened doors to a multi-format publishing strategy I hadn’t thought possible for a new indie author.
What I’d Do Differently
While my overall strategy panned out better than I could have ever imagined, there are some things I could have done differently to get even better results.
- List book two as a preorder before the promotion went live. Between my day job, working on book two, and setting the foundations for my BookBub promotion, I prioritized other tasks over listing the preorder, and I fear I may have lost sales as a result.
- Test promotional images earlier and build hype sooner. I would have tested a range of different images for my social media posts and ads prior to the promotion going live, and I would have started building momentum across platforms earlier.
- Stack secondary promotions closer together. I had BookBub go out on Sunday, another promo on Tuesday, and the third on Thursday. While this worked well, I think stacking each promo on consecutive days — or even all on the same day — would have pushed my rankings higher. I’d also look for additional similar services to fill each day of the promo.
- Use a giveaway tool to grow across all platforms. Instead of running the giveaway only on Instagram, I would have used a tool like Gleam.io to gain followers across all my social media platforms for better long-term growth.
Even though I only have one book out at the time of this article being published, running a Featured Deal was well worth it. In just one week, I gained 800+ new readers — something that would have taken me months, or possibly even years, on my own. If there is one thing I hope other authors take away from my experience, it’s that while the standard advice is often sound, there is no substitute for a well-timed risk backed by thorough preparation. Sometimes you just have to take that chance.
The views and opinions expressed in this guest post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of BookBub. Results from BookBub Featured Deals vary by a range of factors, and your experience may differ.
