Running a price promotion on a book in a series can help you do more than boost sales or visibility for that one title. It can also introduce new readers to your books, increase sales across the series, or build momentum for an upcoming release.
But how to price a book for a series promotion? Should you make the first book free or discount multiple books at once? Should you keep the rest of the series at full price? The answer depends on your marketing goals!
In this post, we’ll share five ebook pricing strategies to consider for your next promotion, along with examples of how authors have used these strategies to grow their readership and sell more books.
1. Goal: Attract as many new readers as possible
If your main goal is to introduce your series to a large number of new readers, consider making the first book free. Free book promotions typically generate significantly more downloads than paid discounts, giving more readers the opportunity to discover your work.
While not every download will turn into a new fan, getting more readers started on your series can lead to more sales down the road!
How to price it:
- First book: Make it free for a limited time, or consider making it permafree if you want to continue attracting new readers long after the promotion ends.
- Later books: Keep the rest of the series at full price. The goal is to encourage readers who enjoy the free book to purchase the sequels.
- Timing: If you’re planning a limited-time free promotion, make sure the price is live before you start advertising it (or before your BookBub promotion!). Retailers and distributors have different requirements for making a book free, so check your options and allow plenty of time for price changes to take effect.
- Keep in mind: This strategy generally works best when you have multiple books available for readers to purchase next. The more books you have in your series, the more opportunities you’ll have to earn revenue from readers who discovered you through the free promotion.
Authors enrolled in KDP Select can run free ebook promotions for up to five days per 90-day enrollment period. If you publish wide, you may have more flexibility to make a book permanently free, depending on your retailers and distributors. Read our discounting tutorial to learn more about how to make a book free.
Examples and case studies:
- How an author uses free first-in-series books to sell across multiple formats
- How a free first-in-series promotion helped revive a backlist
- 11 ways one author ensures their series keeps readers hooked
2. Goal: Encourage readers to buy more books in the series
If you’re already attracting readers to your first book but want to increase sales of the sequels, consider discounting multiple books at once.
Offering a deal on book two gives readers an extra incentive to continue, while discounts on additional titles can encourage them to purchase several books at once. This approach may be worth trying if sales of your first book are strong but purchases of later books aren’t keeping pace.
How to price it:
- First book: Discount it to free or $0.99 to attract new readers.
- Second book: Consider discounting it to $0.99 as well. This gives readers another low-cost opportunity to try the series before committing to full-priced books.
- Later books: Keep them at full price, or experiment with additional discounts or different ways to bundle books if you want to encourage readers to purchase multiple books at once.
- Timing: Run the discounts simultaneously, and consider keeping them live for several days or longer. This gives readers more time to discover the promotion, finish book one, and purchase additional books while they’re on sale.
Don’t forget about your back matter! Include a clear link to the next book in the series, ideally with a short excerpt to encourage readers to keep going.
Example: Discounting two books to encourage series purchases
Fantasy author C. L. Murray found that pricing both books one and two at $0.99 enabled him to drive sell-through for his four-book series.
With books three and four priced at $3.99 and $4.99, he reported that roughly 40% of book one buyers also purchased book two, while 20% purchased the entire series in one click.
Read how C. L. uses BookBub Ads to drive consistent series sales.
3. Goal: Maximize revenue during the promotional period
If your priority is maximizing revenue to earn back spend on a promotion, you should focus on driving results during the promotional period — but you’ll want to think about more than how many copies of your discounted book you can sell.
A lower price may attract more buyers — which is a great goal for maximizing revenue over a longer period — but a higher price means earning more from each sale in the short term. And when you’re promoting a series, you have another source of potential revenue to consider: sales of the other books!
The goal here is to find a promotional price that attracts enough readers while maximizing your earnings across the series.
How to price it:
- First book: Consider a paid discount of $0.99, $1.99, or $2.99, depending on the book’s regular price and your audience. A box set of the first few books in a longer series could also be a good entry point into the series while supporting the higher price. A $0.99 promotion will generally attract more buyers, while a higher price may generate more revenue per copy, but you may need to test different price points and compare the results. When you run a Featured Deal, we’ll always recommend the best price point for your category if you let us know in the comments field of your submission that you’re open to adjusting your pricing.
- Later books: Keep them at full price to earn more from readers who decide to continue the series. If you’ve found that discounting later books helps boost total series revenue, that may be worth testing too.
- Timing: Run your promotion when the rest of your series is available for purchase, so new readers have somewhere to go next.
- Keep in mind: If your goal is total revenue, don’t judge the promotion by sales of the discounted book alone. Include follow-on sales of other books in the series, and account for any advertising or promotion costs when evaluating your earnings.
The amount you earn per sale can vary by retailer, distributor, and promotional price. Before deciding how deeply to discount your book, check what you’ll earn at each price point (including any applicable fees) and weigh the trade-offs: A higher price may mean more royalties per sale, but a lower price could attract more readers who go on to purchase other books in your series.
You may also have opportunities to retain higher royalties at lower price points. For example, some of our partners pair their Featured Deals with Kindle Countdown Deals to maximize earnings from discounted books. This allows eligible authors enrolled in KDP Select to retain their 70% royalty rate even when their ebook is discounted below the usual minimum price.
Example: Using a higher discount price to maximize ROI
When authors Mari Carr and Lila Dubois created a box set of the first four books in their Trinity Masters series, they wanted to attract new readers while maximizing revenue from their promotion.
While the box set launched at $6.99, they priced it at $1.99 for their promotion. Because the box set included four full-length novels, they felt the higher price would still offer readers a compelling deal while helping them earn more per sale.
The strategy paid off! They earned back the cost of their Featured Deal by noon on promotion day and sold 2,500 copies of the box set during the promotion.
Read more about their box set strategy.
4. Goal: Climb paid bestseller lists
If you’re hoping to boost your books’ rankings on retailer bestseller lists, a low-priced promotion can help you generate a high volume of sales in a short period.
While free promotions can increase visibility on free ebook charts, you’ll want to focus on paid discounts if your goal is to climb the paid bestseller lists.
One approach is to discount a book to $0.99 and coordinate several promotions around the sale to drive as many purchases as possible during the promotional period.
How to price it:
- Promoted book: Consider discounting a series title to $0.99 to encourage a high volume of paid sales. You could also experiment with promoting a discounted box set to generate sales across multiple books at once.
- Later books: Keep them at full price, or consider additional discounts if you’re hoping to boost the rankings of multiple titles.
- Timing: Stack multiple promotions during the same week to concentrate sales into a shorter period. This could include a BookBub Featured Deal, other email promotions, advertising campaigns, and your own newsletter.
- Keep in mind: Bestseller rankings are based on retailer-specific factors, and a successful promotion won’t guarantee a particular ranking. If you’re targeting a specific bestseller list, make sure you understand its eligibility requirements and how sales are counted.
Example: Stacking promotions to climb bestseller charts
When author Nick Sullivan launched book four in his Deep series, he wanted to keep sales momentum going across the series. Six days after the new release, he ran a $0.99 BookBub Featured Deal on book three, which had never been promoted before.
To maximize the impact, Nick paired the Featured Deal with a Kindle Countdown Deal and stacked additional promotions in the days before and after the feature.
The strategy helped book three reach #69 in the Kindle Store, while sales of the other books in the series also spiked.
Read how Nick stacked promotions to boost sales and rankings.
5. Goal: Boost preorders and sales of a new release
Have a new book coming out? Running a price promotion on an earlier title can introduce new readers to the series and encourage them to preorder or purchase your newest release.
The key is timing your promotion so readers have an opportunity to catch up on the series before the new book launches. For a longer series, that might mean running your promotion several weeks before release day.
How to price it:
- First book: Make it free or $0.99 to attract as many new readers as possible.
- Later books: Keep them at full price, including the upcoming release, unless an introductory preorder price is part of your launch strategy.
- Timing: Run the promotion early enough for readers to make their way through the series before the new book launches. For a longer series, consider promoting several weeks before release rather than waiting until launch day.
- Keep in mind: While discounting the first book is often the best way to introduce new readers to a series, you can also experiment with promoting a later title if the books can be read independently. For connected standalones or series that don’t require a particular reading order, you may have more flexibility in choosing which book to discount.
Update the back matter of your earlier books with links to the upcoming release. If the new book is available for preorder, make it easy for readers to purchase it as soon as they finish the previous installment.
Example: Turning free downloads into preorders
When author Christina Baehr ran a free BookBub Featured Deal for her debut novel, she had three books published in the series and a fourth available for preorder.
Her Featured Deal drove more than 20,000 downloads overnight. In the weeks that followed, readers worked their way through the series and began preordering book four.
Christina credits the excerpts and preorder links in her back matter with helping readers continue to the next book. Read how her debut promotion helped her build a full-time author career.
To recap: What’s the best price for a BookBub deal?
Is a higher price always the better choice for driving more revenue for your series? Not necessarily!
Many authors running higher-priced Featured Deals already have established readerships, and these deals can be harder to get selected for. A $2.99 discount may also be less compelling for readers unfamiliar with your work.
BookBub partners generally see higher sales volume at $0.99 than $2.99, and if you’re still building an audience, free or $0.99 could ultimately generate more revenue through sales of the rest of your series.
How to measure the success of your series promotion
Once your promotion ends, check whether the results matched your goal. Here are a few metrics to look at:
- Reaching new readers: Downloads or sales of the promoted book.
- Increasing series purchases: Sales of later books in the series compared to before the promotion.
- Maximizing revenue: Total series royalties and net earnings after promotion costs.
- Boosting rankings: Changes in your books’ retailer rankings during and after the promotion.
- Supporting a new release: Preorders or sales of the new book.
Remember that readers may take weeks to work their way through a series, so don’t evaluate your results on promotion day alone! Compare sales over the following weeks to your usual baseline to get a better sense of the promotion’s impact.
Ready to put one of these strategies to work? Submit a book for a BookBub Featured Deal!
