If your book has been selected for a Featured Deal, congratulations! Once you secure a feature, what can you do to make sure your promotion gets the best results possible? We’ve put together a checklist to help you cover all your bases and ensure everything runs smoothly, from the day you receive your Featured Deal offer to the day we send your feature and beyond!
Download a printable checklist!
Subscribe to the BookBub Partners Blog to download this checklist as a printable PDF, and keep it handy any time you’re preparing for a Featured Deal!
When you receive your Featured Deal offer:
1. Check the details
Getting selected for a Featured Deal can be very exciting; however, it’s important to make sure that your offer aligns with your marketing goals. Before confirming your deal, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you happy with the date of your feature?
- Are you positive that you’ll be able to discount your book by the Featured Deal send date? (This is a good time to check in with your retailers!)
- If the editors selected your book for a different category than the one you submitted for, do you have any concerns about that decision?
- If the editors selected your book for a deal in our non-US regions only, are you open to that?
If you have any questions or hesitations about your Featured Deal offer, we’d encourage you to reply to the offer email to discuss the details with a member of our team.
2. Confirm your deal
Once you’ve reviewed your offer (and you feel good about it), you’re ready to confirm your Featured Deal. You’ll be able to confirm and pay for your deal via the link in the offer email or in the Featured Deals section of your Dashboard.
If the promotion details don’t align with your marketing goals at the moment, you’re welcome to decline the feature. You can resubmit a different book for consideration right away, or resubmit the same book after 30 days.
Once you’ve confirmed your deal:
3. Prepare your discount on retailers
Set up your discount to go live a day or two in advance of your Featured Deal to mitigate the risk of delays or other potential issues. Each retailer and distributor will have specific instructions for how to do this — check their processes and guidelines as soon as you confirm your deal. Remember, all discounts must be live by 12:00 a.m. Pacific on the day of your Featured Deal!
4. Plan other marketing
You can increase the impact and reach of your Featured Deal by planning other promotions while the book is discounted, which is referred to as “promo stacking.” Promo stacking is when authors run multiple marketing campaigns within a short timeframe to maximize the volume of sales. Here are three examples of successful promo stacking by other authors:
- Teiran Smith used several strategies to promote her international Featured Deal, landing her book on Amazon bestseller lists in multiple countries!
- Mike Chen stacked promotions in order to amplify his Featured Deal as a traditionally published author.
- Juliette Banks shares the marketing tactics she used to maximize the impact of her first-ever Featured Deal.
5. Update the back matter of the discounted book
An ebook’s back matter — the pages that follow the end of the narrative — is prime real estate for promoting other books, driving newsletter sign-ups, or encouraging readers to leave reviews. Updating the back matter in advance of a Featured Deal is a great way to extend your promotion’s impact! Check out these examples for inspiration.
6. Claim or update your Author Profile
We recommend regularly updating your BookBub Author Profile, but it’s especially important if you have a Featured Deal coming up. Your Author Profile is one place fans and potential readers will go to learn more about you, your other books, and why they should pick up your latest deal. You can expect a Featured Deal to bring new visitors to your page!
7. Double-check the details
In the days before your Featured Deal, double-check all the details. Will the book be discounted on retailers in time? Let us know as early as possible if there’s anything important we should know about your book — for instance, if there are multiple editions of the same book available on retailers, or if the cover has recently changed.
If you need to change your promotion plans, we need at least seven days’ notice to reschedule or cancel a Featured Deal, though we ask that you give us as much advance notice as possible.
The day of your Featured Deal:
8. Enjoy your promotion!
Your deal will go live on our website between 6:00–9:00 a.m. Pacific, and the email will usually be delivered to all readers by noon Pacific. Our team will email you if we’re unable to include any particular retailer links where the deal price is unavailable. If this does happen, don’t panic — your feature will proceed with your remaining retailers.
If you’d like to see your feature in your own inbox, check your BookBub reader preferences to confirm you’re subscribed to your book’s category! Remember that you’ll only see links to your own preferred retailer in your Featured Deal email.
9. Share the deal
Once your discount is live, let readers know! When sharing your discount, it can be helpful to link to your book’s page on BookBub so readers can get the deal from their retailer of choice. To spread the word, try:
- Promoting the deal on social media channels like Instagram.
- Sharing the sale with your newsletter subscribers.
- Asking fellow authors to post a BookBub Recommendation. This can be a great way to extend the reach of your promotion to other authors’ fans, since we email our users anytime a book recommended by someone they follow has a deal on BookBub!
While the discount remains live:
10. Keep up the momentum!
There are a few things you can do to extend the impact of your Featured Deal. In the days following your deal, consider:
- Running BookBub Ads campaigns. BookBub Ads allow you to continue reaching an engaged and relevant audience of BookBub readers in the days after your feature. If your deal price is available for more than one day, this is the perfect time for an ad campaign — ads for discounted books get more clicks! For tips and inspiration, see how other authors ran effective ads for free and discounted books.
- Submitting another book for a Featured Deal! We can feature a different book by each author once every 30 days, and we can schedule features up to 30 days in advance. This means the day after a feature is a great time to submit the book you’d like to promote next. To boost your chances of getting another book selected, follow these submission tips.
Remember, you can download this checklist as a printable PDF to keep handy any time you’re preparing for a Featured Deal (this will subscribe you to the BookBub Partners Blog, which you can opt out of at any time).
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