If you’ve submitted a book for a BookBub Featured Deal, you’ll know that the submission form includes a field for your comments beyond the standard category, pricing, and availability information you provide about your deal. The comments field is optional, but our editors gladly welcome any additional information that can help them make the best decisions about your submission. No one knows your book and your circumstances better than you do, so you can feel free to use the comments field to let us in on your plans, help us find a spot that will work for you, and more. But many authors wonder what to write — and whether it will help or harm their chances of getting selected.
If you’re stumped about what kind of comments we editors find helpful, we’re here to take out some of the guesswork. These are six great ways you can use the comments field to your advantage so you can feel confident about your submission.
1. Notes on Dates and Timing
There’s a spot in the submission form to include the dates you’d like to run a Featured Deal, but we get it — sometimes your situation feels like it needs a little more context. Use the comments field to let us know about the timing of any other promotions you have going, whether you can be flexible about the dates you entered, dates you absolutely cannot make work, or any vaguer preferences around timing (for example, “I can be flexible, but I’d prefer a spot near the end of January.”) Both the editors and the Partners team work hard to accommodate these kinds of requests!
2. Flexibility on Deal Price
The comments section is the best place to indicate whether you’re flexible on price point for your Featured Deal. You may submit for a $0.99 deal, but if you’re willing to discount to free as well, editors have that much more flexibility to offer you a promotion given which spots are open on the schedule. And vice versa — sometimes editors may feel your book will perform well at a higher price point and offer you a $0.99 deal if no free slots are available. Both free and $0.99 are great options for driving downloads and sales (at a higher rate than higher price points), and indicating your flexibility on your deal price can only help your chances of having your book selected.
3. Tropes and Spoilers
As editors, we spend a lot of time thinking about and analyzing what tropes and plot elements BookBub readers enjoy. We use your book description and reader reviews to get a good sense of what your book is about, but the comments field is a great place to include a brief list of tropes and spoilers that may or may not be included on your retailer pages. This helps us get a more comprehensive idea of whether your book is a fit for the category you suggested in your submission or might work better to a different category’s audience. As a bonus, if your book is accepted, this list will help editors write the best, most accurate blurb possible for your book when we get ready to run your Featured Deal!
4. Trade Publication Quotes and Reviews
If you have a coveted quote from a trade publication like Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, or Publishers Weekly (including the BookLife Prize), we want to know about it! In our opinion, a quote like this should be at the front and center of your book description on retailer pages, but if it’s not, make sure to include it in the comments section so we can be impressed (and potentially include the quote in a future blurb if your book is accepted!). You can even include a quote for one of your other books if it speaks to the quality of your work! Don’t feel like you need to include quotes from reader reviews in place of one from a trade publication, though — editors take the time to look through those on retailer pages and Goodreads, so we’ve got plenty to work with.
5. Your Book’s Retailer Status
The submission form includes space to select the retailers where your book will be discounted, but is there more to your book’s retailer status? It could make a difference if a book has recently gone wide on all retailers, is in the process of going wide, or will go wide once accepted for a Featured Deal. It’s okay if this isn’t the case for your book, but any changes in this area are helpful for editors to know as they weigh your submission against other possible options.
6. Other Relevant Categories
Are you submitting a book to Fantasy, but think it might also fit in Supernatural Suspense? Or does your Science Fiction book have a teen protagonist, making it a potential fit for our Teen and Young Adult category? Editors work to make sure your book is promoted in the category where it has the best chance of success, and mentioning what other categories may be relevant in the comments section helps with that process.
We hope this list has given you some helpful ideas and food for thought as you prepare your next Featured Deal submission. Remember, a lot of the selection process has to do with timing, so don’t give up if your book isn’t chosen right off the bat! Keep trying (you can submit each book once every 30 days!) and make sure to give us all the relevant information in your submission so we can make the best decisions possible while evaluating all the great books you send our way.
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Click to tweet: ⚠️Read this before submitting for a BookBub Featured Deal! Super helpful tips here on what to include in the comments section to improve your chances of getting selected: https://bit.ly/48i7cxO #writingcommunity
Click to tweet: Authors, if you want to make sure you have the best chance of getting selected for a BookBub deal, check out these tips from the editors on what to include in your submission: https://bit.ly/48i7cxO #pubtip
