If you’re a seasoned veteran at applying for BookBub Featured Deals, then you know the process can be highly competitive. We receive hundreds of submissions per day, and we’re only able to select about 25% of them for Featured Deals.
BookBub has always limited the number of books we feature in order to avoid overwhelming our subscribers and to ensure all our partners’ deals have a good chance of performing well. When we select a book, we want to give it every opportunity to achieve strong clicks and sales, and we do that by picking the titles that stand out as likely to be the most aligned with our readers’ current tastes. That means we take into account readers’ preferences for price, reviews, covers, and more.
Although we’ve previously shared how our selection process works, we get tons of questions from our partners about how to increase their chances of being selected by our Editorial team. As a BookBub editor myself, I’ve rounded up my team’s top tips for improving your chances of selection for a Featured Deal. Here’s the best advice we’ve got on strengthening your submissions!
1. Make your deal price as competitive as possible
We promise our subscribers the best deals available. The lower the price, the more appealing it is to our subscribers, and the higher the conversion rate of a BookBub Featured Deal. That means more sales of your book!
Knowing this, our editors prefer books that are competitively priced, since those will drive a higher volume of reader engagement. So, while your deal price should be based on your book marketing goals, pricing as low as possible will entice more readers to purchase your book.
If you’re not selected for a Featured Deal at $0.99 or higher, consider resubmitting your book for a free promotion, as this can be an effective way to increase your chances of getting selected. We consider free and non-free deals separately, so submitting at the free price tier might be just the lever you need to pull to have your book accepted.
Keep in mind that the competitiveness of your deal price depends on your category. While books are often priced higher in categories like Literary Fiction and Cooking, it’s normal to see lower prices in speculative fiction and romance categories. Browse the featured books on BookBub in your category to see what prices we tend to feature in your genre. Again, if your book is not selected at one price, try resubmitting at a lower price or for free. Your chances of being selected will often be higher!
2. Accumulate reader reviews
Reader reviews and ratings help our editors get a sense of how readers have responded to your book, and they are a crucial element of the selection process.
While there is no “minimum requirement” for the number of reviews a book needs to get selected, our editors are generally more likely to choose books with higher numbers of authentic and positive customer reviews, since books with established platforms tend to perform best with our readers. We recommend browsing through the books we’re featuring in your category to get a sense of what a competitive number of positive reviews is for that genre. If your book wasn’t selected for a Featured Deal, look at the books that were and resubmit when you have a comparable number of reviews.
We also look at the content of reviews to see what about your book is most engaging to readers. Whether they’re fans of your intricate world-building, your rich character development, or your action-packed plot, we want to know! Likewise, if readers feel something is missing from your story or have a complaint about proofreading, we pay attention to that, too. More than just a gauge of the popularity of your book, reader reviews are one of our best sources of information on what you’re offering readers and whether it aligns with what our specific BookBub audience is looking for.
Please note that we’re looking for legitimate reviews, and we do examine them for veracity during our evaluation process.
3. Garner critical reviews
Write-ups from trusted editorial sources can also help our editors evaluate your submission more favorably, and the same goes for awards, bestseller lists, and other accolades. We see increased engagement from our readers when we’re able to cite an author as a bestseller or award winner, or include a blurb from a recognizable author, so editors are more likely to choose those books.
Here are a few things you can do to try to amplify your presence amongst trusted editorial sources:
- Submit your book for relevant editorial reviews. You can pay for guaranteed reviews from reputable publications like Kirkus Reviews and BookLife by Publishers Weekly. Be sure to check the submission requirements for each service. Editors love to quote these reviews in our blurbs, so if you have a positive review, make sure we know about it!
- Get blurbs from well-known authors. Blurbs are often effective at catching readers’ attention — especially if those readers are familiar with the blurbing author — and can help entice them to make that final purchasing decision. Here are tips on how to get blurbs and use them on your book marketing assets.
- Submit your book as an award contender. Including an author’s awards in BookBub’s blurbs increases credibility, piques readers’ interest, and improves engagement. Find relevant or genre-specific awards and submit a book for consideration! Check out this list of some of the best trad and indie awards on our blog, or this list of awards and contests open to indie authors by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), which includes tips on the kinds of contests to avoid.
Note that this suggestion will only really impact your chances of selection if the endorsement is from a widely recognizable author, publication, or award. If your chances of receiving these accolades are small, it’s best to focus your efforts elsewhere, such as growing your reviews from readers. Plenty of books we feature have not won awards or received notable endorsements, but it can certainly increase your chances.
4. Have a professionally designed cover optimized for your genre
We look for books with professional and appealing covers. A great cover design can not only sway our editors, but also have a major impact on your sales numbers. For example, historical fiction author Jean Gill saw a huge spike in sales after a cover redesign helped her land a Featured Deal.
Like many things in publishing, cover designs are incredibly subjective, and best practices differ by genre. Elements like the image, font face, featured characters, and colors all affect the emotional reaction potential readers might have.
Here are a couple tips to make sure your cover meets our standards:
- Study what kinds of covers are trending in your genre. Review the covers of bestselling books or the titles BookBub features in your genre to see what’s working well. Our editors are more likely to pass on a book if they feel the cover isn’t going to appeal to our readers in that category.
- Consider hiring a professional designer. If your book isn’t selected for a Featured Deal and you suspect your cover could use a revamp, consider hiring a designer who has experience designing covers in your genre. We’ve listed a few of our favorite design resources here.
While your cover can make a big difference in influencing our editors’ decision, remember that it’s just one of the many factors they review, so redesigning your cover won’t guarantee selection upon your next submission. But a great cover design is something that will boost your chances of success, both with BookBub and with readers visiting your product page.
5. Optimize your retailer product page description
Because we direct our members to the retailer product pages for the books we feature, we want to ensure they’ll have a good experience once they arrive. We look for product pages with descriptions that are informative, clear, well-written, and error-free. Your book description is your best chance to convince readers to buy your book, so it’s important to put your best foot forward!
Here are a few things you should take into account when writing the description for your book:
- Include a concise pitch of your book. Make it really clear what your plot is about and what the stakes are. Avoid dense paragraphs of text, but also include more than two sentences of information. You should include enough plot points to pique the reader’s interest, but not so many that you give away the whole storyline of your book. Think about what your hook is, and use that to play to readers’ interests.
- Add any relevant accolades. Are you an award-winning writer? A respected leader in your field? Was your last book a New York Times bestseller? Did someone famous give you a killer blurb? Add in this kind of accolade.
- Avoid typos and grammar mistakes. Your book description is one of the first things our editors review, and any errors in the copy will leave an impression. We recommend having another person (or two!) review your book description before you publish it.
6. Offer your book on all retailers
When members sign up for BookBub, they let us know which ebook retailers they want to see deals for. So if a book is available on all the major retailers — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Google Play, and Kobo — more of our readers will be able to snatch it up, which makes the book more appealing to our editors. Between two books with equally competitive platforms, content, and deal prices, the editors will almost always choose the book available on more retailers.
To easily distribute your book to multiple retailers and discount your book when the time comes, you might want to consider using a distributor like Draft2Digital or PublishDrive. See a comparison of the most popular book distributors here.
7. Include all regions in your submission
We have separate lists of subscribed readers for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and the more readers worldwide who can access your book deal, the more favorable your submission. Sometimes editors will have space to send your book to just our international regions instead of to the US, or vice versa, so submitting for a Featured Deal in all regions allows for flexibility and the chance at some kind of promotion rather than none — you might discover you have more fans in other countries than you expected!
We always recommend our partners make their books available wherever readers might want to purchase them, whether it’s different retailers or different regions. This is a good practice that goes beyond submitting your book for a BookBub Featured Deal. The more retailers and regions your book is available in, the stronger your foundation for consistent, long-term sales.
8. Be flexible with your promotion date
While this doesn’t necessarily affect the editorial selection process, we do have a limited number of spots in each category for any given week. So if your promotion dates are flexible, it’s more likely that we’ll be able to find an available date for your Featured Deal. If you have specific promotion dates in mind, we’d recommend submitting your deal as far in advance as possible (up to 30 days prior to your desired deal date). That way, if you do get selected, we have a greater chance of finding something that will work for both our schedules.
9. Be flexible with your categories
Another factor that gives editors more flexibility to offer you a promotion is the category your book could be featured in. Many categories overlap — for example, a paranormal cozy mystery could do well to either our Cozy Mystery category or our Supernatural Suspense category, depending on the content — and our editors work hard to vet titles and make sure that they’re evaluated in all of the categories where they might fit.
Remember that BookBub editors have a lot of expertise in understanding what tropes, themes, and subgenres work well to our unique audiences of readers in each of our categories, so when they switch your book over to a category you didn’t initially choose, they’re offering you the best chance for your book to perform strongly according to current reader tastes and preferences. Notably, BookBub readers’ interests don’t always align exactly with the broader publishing market, so wider industry and genre trends might not fully apply to BookBub category readers.
It’s also possible that there are more spots open on the calendar for a different category than the one you chose! You can use the comments field to indicate other categories you’re open to, but editors will consider category fit regardless when they look at your submission.
10. Make sure your book is eligible
None of these tips will help you land a Featured Deal if your book doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for eligibility. Make sure your book’s pricing history and length meet the required standards and that it hasn’t been featured in the last six months. Editors are looking not just for how well a book fits with our readers’ tastes but also for whether or not it adheres to these requirements, so it’s important to follow those guidelines exactly. A book might be a great fit in terms of cover and plot, but we can’t accept it if it’s been discounted for a long time already or if it doesn’t meet the minimum required page length.
Keep in mind that there are other factors in our editors’ decision-making process outside of your control. For example, certain tropes, themes, genres, and subgenres perform better with our readers than others. There’s a chance we simply don’t have the right category for your title right now or that other books submitted to your category better fit the subject matter our readers are looking for. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your book — it may just not be the best fit for our particular audience.
Lastly, your submission is always being compared to other submissions we’re receiving in your category around the same time. This is why we encourage partners to continue resubmitting their books. If you resubmit your title a few months down the road, it may very well be one of the most competitive submissions we receive that week, even if it wasn’t this week (especially if you make some of the changes suggested in this article). We ask that you please wait at least four weeks before submitting a title for a second time. The one exception to this request is that you can resubmit right away if you submit for a lower deal price.
If you have questions about any of these tips, feel free to reach out to our author support team at partners@bookbub.com. Good luck with your next submission!
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