Reaching new readers and telling fans about books can be a constant challenge for both debut and well-seasoned authors. One of our goals at BookBub is to help authors and publishers build an even broader audience of readers who will love their books.
Authors, as long as you have a Partner account on BookBub, there are a number of ways you can easily increase your discoverability and help new readers find your books. We’ve outlined some of these strategies below. Publishers and agents, feel free to share this post with your authors so they can take advantage of these discovery opportunities as well.
1. Make sure your Author Profile looks great.
Sprucing up your Author Profile is one of the easiest ways to reach BookBub readers — and it doesn’t take much time! Once you’ve added your author bio and photo, you’ll automatically be eligible for a number of free discoverability features BookBub offers, including:
- Sign-up Suggestions: When new readers sign-up for BookBub, they see suggested authors to follow based on their category interests.
- Recommended Author Emails: BookBub sends emails to readers suggesting specific authors to follow. These recommendation emails are tailored to each reader and may include authors whose books that reader has recently viewed or authors we believe they’ll like based on our data.
- Book Page Follow Button: If you’ve claimed your Author Profile and added a headshot and bio, your author profile and a Follow button will appear on any of your book pages on the BookBub website. This means that readers who search for your books can also easily follow you for any future alerts.
BookBub will also include your completed profile on our Discover Authors page. Readers can use this page to browse within their favorite genres to find new authors they’re most likely to love. The best way to make sure your profile is reaching the audience you want is to update your author genres — the more specific your genres, the more relevant the audience you’ll reach!
Haven’t claimed your Author Profile yet? You can do so here!
2. Update your book data through your My Books page.
We’ve worked hard to build a comprehensive book database so our readers can easily find any book on BookBub.com. They can also bookmark these books and save them on their Wanted (Deal Alert) lists.
Adding your books to the My Books page on your Partner Dashboard is a great first step to making sure our readers will be able to find them on our site. Once they’re added, you can make sure our readers are seeing the latest version of your book by requesting changes on anything that might be old or out-of-date, including your cover, book description, or title. (Learn more about this here!)
You can also update your books’ retailer links on your My Books page. Our readers buy books across all the major ebook retailers, so making sure these links are up-to-date will help ensure that any reader who finds your book can purchase it on the retailer of their choice.
Please note that if you have an upcoming Featured Deal, you can contact us directly so we can make sure your retailer links are updated in time for your feature!
3. Set up New Release Alerts.
Letting readers know about a book launch is a good way to drive sales not only of your new book, but also of earlier books your fans may not have discovered yet. New Release Alerts are a free way to let your BookBub followers know about a launch — and because these emails include links to your retailer pages, readers may also stumble upon other books you’ve written!
As long as you’ve added your new release to your My Books page on, before, or up to seven days after its release date, our team will confirm that your book meets our timing and page length guidelines for a new release. We’ll then send a dedicated email to your followers on BookBub letting them know about your new book. Once you’ve set up a New Release Alert, double check to make sure all your retailer links are ready to go on your My Books page — that way, even more of your followers will be able to enjoy your new book!
4. Grow your BookBub Follower count.
Now that you’ve claimed your profile, added your books to our site, and set up a New Release Alert, you can maximize your reach by increasing your BookBub follower count. The more followers you have, the more readers will hear about your upcoming deals and new releases.
You can get started by encouraging your followers on other social media platforms to follow you on BookBub too, but we’d also encourage you to check out these other great tips for building your BookBub following.
5. Run a BookBub Ads campaign.
BookBub Ads is our newest discoverability tool, and we’re really excited about helping authors market their books on this platform. The ad appears at the bottom of BookBub’s daily emails.
While Featured Deals have set guidelines about the books you can send to our readers, the ad space allows you to reach BookBub readers with any book you’d like, whenever you’d like. BookBub Ads also lets you reach specific audiences with your books — you can reach readers who’ve expressed interest in specific authors and book categories — and you get to control how much you spend.
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