A BookBub Featured Deal can drive a wealth of new readers to your book — but what you do before your promotion runs can make all the difference. To help you set yourself up for success, we asked over 200 partners with recent Featured Deals to share how they prepared for their promotions and the strategies that delivered the biggest impact. From fine-tuning your book page to planning for long-term readthrough, here’s how to prepare a Featured Deal promotion to drive lasting momentum.
Polish your book page
A Featured Deal is a wonderful way to introduce your work to new readers. Like any other first impression, you want to put your best foot forward — and the most effective way to do this leading up to your promotion is to polish your book page! Take a look at your reader-facing content — book description, cover, sample, and metadata — and see if there are any updates you’d like to make before it’s shown to fresh eyes. Even small tweaks to this content can help the influx of traffic convert to purchases, downloads, and lasting read-through.
Make sure all your front-facing items are as good as you can get them. Ensure your cover meets genre expectations, your book has an engaging description, try to source a good number of reviews, and double-check that your sample pages are error-free and engaging.
—Trisha Messmer, author of A Duke in the Rough
Know what you’re selling. All publishing success stories start with story/cover/blurb alignment. If one of those elements is a mismatch, it can be much more difficult to connect with readers. I write dark romance with a focus on mental health representation, yet I used to have illustrated “rom-com” covers, because they were in vogue. It was a complete miss for most readers, and I spent a long time digging myself out of that hole.
—Astra Capone, author of Did I Lie?
Update your back matter
A majority of BookBub partners suggest including links at the end of your promoted book to keep readers interested and eager to download more of your work. Updating your back matter to include links to other books in the series, other standalone titles, an author website, and a newsletter sign-up can make a big impact on keeping readers in your catalog and community.
The biggest difference came from preparing the series for readthrough. Before my promotion, I updated the back matter to direct readers to the next book in the series with clear links. This helped turn a large number of downloads into ongoing sales across the series.
—Alex MacLean, author of Sorrowful Road
Think of what you want readers to do once they’ve read your book (read book two, sign up for your list, etc.), and focus your attention on that.
—Barbara Cool Lee, author of The Inconvenient Corpse
Discount other books in the series
If one of your goals is to boost read-through, our experienced partners have another pro tip for you: In addition to including links in your book’s back matter, discount other books in the series at the time of your Featured Deal! This can help make your other titles more accessible to new readers, and lead to lasting effects long after the date of your promotion.
If your book is part of a series, discount the books around it. They’ll sell like crazy! On a previous Featured Deal, this strategy pushed the first three books in my series into Amazon’s paid Top 30 for Amateur Sleuths — and the first book in the series peaked at #19.
—Darin Miller, author of Deception
Focus on longer-term goals rather than an immediate return on your investment, and don’t be afraid to run a sale on your entire series. I spent a lot of time updating all the back matter and my email welcome sequence, but I think the biggest difference was having all books in the series at $0.99 for two weeks until book four launched. I believe a lot of people impulse-bought the entire series with one click!
—Janet Koops, author of Magic in Mistletoe
Set your promotional price early
A common housekeeping tip that our partners recommend is to set your discounted deal price several days before your Featured Deal is scheduled to run. Some retailers’ price-matching process can take a while, and a pricing glitch on the morning of your promotion could potentially present a barrier to us including your title in that day’s Featured Deals email. To avoid this problem, most experienced partners advise setting your title at the deal price at least one day in advance.
Contact retailers well in advance to ensure the book is discounted. Sometimes they can be temperamental!
—Anonymous author
Time your Featured Deal strategically
One of the best things about a BookBub Featured Deal is how much control you have over the timing of your promotion. You can request a specific date range in your submission form, or you can deliberately submit your book at a time that coincides with an upcoming release, which is a strategy that many of our seasoned partners recommend. Strategically timing your promotion can drive more traffic to a new release to help you build buzz, ratings, and reviews — while still reaping the more direct benefits of a Featured Deal.
I did nothing for this promotion except time the release of the sequel to coincide with my BookBub Featured Deal on the first book in the series. There has been a bit of a tail, which is still evident even now. Five months later, these books are still selling better than they were before!
—Anonymous author
If applicable, pair your Featured Deal with a KDP Countdown Deal
For those whose ebooks are sold exclusively by Amazon, pairing your Featured Deal with a Kindle Countdown Deal is a lesser-known hack that our partners recommend for maximizing earnings from your Featured Deal. Promoting your title on BookBub will drive traffic to the book’s Amazon page either way, but enrolling in a Countdown Deal will allow you to keep a higher percentage of royalties.
Setting a Kindle Countdown Deal in conjunction with my Bookbub Featured Deal allowed me to have a higher royalty from Amazon as opposed to if I lowered the price manually.
—Kristin Helling, author of In Roast Mortem
A Featured Deal can open your book up to a whole new audience, and many of our partners agree it’s worth putting in a little extra work to make the most of that opportunity. You don’t have to do everything on this list — even one or two of these steps can make a meaningful impact on how your promotion performs! Take a look at your book with fresh eyes, choose the tips most relevant to your situation, and when you’re ready, submit your book for a Featured Deal.
Next, learn everything you can do on the day and weeks following your promotion to keep that sales momentum going.
