If you’re an independent author or a publisher with worldwide rights, exclusively marketing your books in the US is a huge missed opportunity. The international book market is growing rapidly, and English-speaking foreign markets are low-hanging fruit for increasing sales and gaining worldwide exposure.
As you already know, running a price promotion is a fantastic way to drive ebook downloads and revenue. By discounting your book and promoting that price drop via discovery tools like BookBub, you’ll reach an audience of millions of power readers, 95 percent of whom are eager to try out books from new authors they discover through a price promotion. When you submit your book for a BookBub Featured Deal, you can easily elect to run your promotion in all our international editions, which now include the UK, Canada, and India.
Here are a few reasons you should consider running an international price promotion:
Book sales are growing globally
Global book revenue will rise $8 billion from 2014 to 2019, with India driving a significant portion of this growth. India became the 10th-largest book market in 2014 and is forecasted to experience the fastest growth in total book revenue over the next few years.
Additionally, consumer ebooks will see a 125 percent increase in revenue over the next five years.
Global print and ebook revenue in 2013 and 2018, by type (in billion U.S. dollars)
It’s worth getting your ebooks into developing markets early, and this is a prime time to break into these growing worldwide markets. Without the need for translation or shipping logistics, marketing ebooks in English-language international markets is a great way to expand your readership. And focusing on global marketing now means that by the time a region has fully adopted ebooks, you’ll have a solid base of readers there already. You have an opportunity to make a name for yourself overseas before the market becomes too saturated.
Reach a wider audience and increase revenue
This may be an obvious point, but promoting your book in regions outside the US will help you reach fresh readers who may not have heard of you or your books before.
Running price promotions internationally can also help you increase revenue. Partners running BookBub Featured Deals see a 32 percent higher increase in sales when they promote their book in our international editions as well as the US edition.
Also, 12.8 percent of the revenue generated from these partners’ price promotions came from international sales. So be sure to include all our international regions the next time you submit a book for a BookBub Featured Deal.
Diversify your revenue streams
As a self-published author or a traditional publishing house, you’re running a business, and smart business sales strategies always include diversified revenue streams. We always recommend our partners make their books available wherever readers might want to purchase them, whether it’s different retailers or different regions. The more retailers and regions your book is available in, the stronger your foundation for consistent, long-term sales.
Build international momentum for books already popular in the US
If you’ve already run multiple BookBub promotions for your books in the US, many of our members have likely already seen your titles in their daily deals email. By featuring your book in our international editions, you’ll be reaching an entirely new batch of readers and potential fans.
Running an international Featured Deal also helps bolster the number of reviews you have in each region. Amazon, for example, has separate reviews for each region based on the reviewers’ location and where they purchased the book.
Running a price promotion is a great way to build up your reviews in different regions. 70 percent of BookBub partners saw increased measures of exposure after running a Featured Deal. So by promoting your deals in the UK, Canada, and India, you’ll likely get more reviews in those regions, which will increase your book’s credibility for future marketing efforts.
Increase your likelihood of getting selected for a Featured Deal
Because of the volume of submissions we get, our editors are typically only able to select around 10–15 percent of the books submitted to us for Featured Deals.
But because our international editions are newer, the competition for Featured Deal placements isn’t as high as it is in the US yet. So if you want to run a BookBub Featured Deal and you don’t get selected in the US, consider submitting your book to our UK, Canada, and/or India lists. We can run region-specific promotions!
Resources to help you run international price promotions
Submitting your book to BookBub’s international regions only takes a couple clicks, but we often get questions from partners on how to drop the price of their ebooks internationally. Here are a few resources that can help:
- How to discount your book in the UK
- How do discount your book in Canada
- How to discount your book in India
- BookBub Partners’ international FAQ page
If you have any questions about promoting your books to an international audience, please let us know in the comments below!
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