Well, that was a ride. As the aftermath continues this is my BookBub Featured Deal results in depth and presented with a hope to help a fellow author. This post first premiered on Patreon for my most loyal of followers and if you sign up, you’ll get to access to my most exclusive content before anyone else.

I shall go through the basics and then lay out my results with a hope to explain how I got them for anyone looking to learn something about book promotion. Let us dive in!

The Who’s

Firstly, who am I? Hello, my name is Lee Hall and I’m an indie author from the UK. You’ve probably seen me Tweeting about my author endeavours and my journey of indie publishing 8 books. Over the years I’ve done my best to lay out everything I’ve learned to find some success that I consider myself happy with. My core belief is to pass on my learning to others because it connects me with so many awesome creatives. Plus helping others feels good. This has attracted quite a following over on Twitter and I currently have 35,000+ followers.

So who are BookBub? Well BookBub are the original book promotion website and advertise mostly digital books across the internet to thousands or potentially millions of readers who also review said books – this kind of thing is gold for indie authors who struggle to find readers and then readers who review. Because BB have been around for a while they have become quite effective with finding readers for books. They offer a range of advertising but this post will be covering a Featured Deal that I managed to secure with them for my 6 years young debut novel Open Evening. I have managed to secure two featured deals in previous years for another book. This Featured Deal would be a free promotion, meaning Open Evening would be free to download for two days.

Tip: Free promotions are a great way to get more eyes on your book whilst also attracting others to more books you may have.

The How’s

There’s a lot of talk about the coveted Featured Deal that BookBub offer. Those who haven’t secured one tend to sceptically sway towards the whole ‘is it really worthwhile’ argument and then there’s those who have secured one who call it the ‘Holy Grail’ of book promotions and as a now three time Featured Deal securer, I can say the results I’ve got were life changing but how did I manage to secure even one Featured deal?

Do you need 50+ reviews? Are there any awards or accolades that will help? Will being ‘wide’ give me a better chance? Will BB even take a chance on my unknown self published title?

They are all great and valid questions but from experience, I’ve only really had one major thing that got me three featured deals – the basic anatomy which consists of:

Professional Cover;

Unique or stand-out title;

Enticing Blurb;

Edited (to some extent) Manuscript;

Optional: A decent social media presence.

If your book has these four things then you have a chance at securing a BookBub Featured deal. Anything else, may or may not help but I wouldn’t really know because I’m certain my books were chosen mainly based upon this stuff. Let’s look at that in a practical sense.

The Teleporter has been featured twice and as you can see at a glance it has that basic anatomy. Back when it got chosen for the second time in 2021 it had less than 20 reviews and it was only available via Amazon much like it is today. So the reason I have come to this conclusion is because the basic anatomy is all that I had in my arsenal for a long time. Later on and today my social media presence mainly on Twitter helps things, if BookBub do look at your socials, and they are mainly pleasant or if you conduct yourself well then you’ll probably increase your chances.

A final major factor outside of the anatomy and social media presence is to get yourself a BookBub profile and start using it. The sign up process works much like Goodreads and it is basically a simpler version. Get the ball rolling with it and that will certainly help.

Above all, the best way to secure a BookBub featured deal is to keep applying for one again and again, until they tell you to stop for a month. Then after a month, apply again. Eventually, and like many things in this author world, good things come to those who keep going.

Timing

Most comedians, performers and even chefs will tell you the key to good things in their field is timing and securing a BookBub Featured deal at the right time will give your book the best chance of success. This Featured Deal would happen on the 20th of September 2022 – just days after the last book in my Order of the Following series would launch which brings me to a rather big tip:

Rather big tip: If you have a completed series, or a series of books, a BookBub featured deal will put eyes on all books in that series if one of them is featured. If you discount those books in that series, they will sell.

As for me, Open Evening is the first book in that Order of the Following Series meaning as this deal was happening, my timing was couldn’t have been better, for once. Sometimes, just sometimes things align.

Now let us look at the results and the results of any good book promotion can be measured in a number of ways, from units sold, to chart positions but to me, if results are still happening a long time after the promo, then that promo was a big success.

The Results

On the 20th of September 2022 my debut book Open Evening was free and featured by BookBub with the rest of the books in the Order of the Following Series discounted to 99 cents or equivalent. Here are the results:

Day 1 of the free promo, OE was downloaded over 8,000 times with another 1,500 on the next day! With the small promo I ran earlier in the month combined with the Featured deal this pushed the total free downloads to 9,895 across 13 different territories. A fantastic result!

Now let us look at paid sales driven by this promotion.

Every book in the Order of the Following Series sold very well and Darke Apocalypse which was released just days before became my best ever release!

New Records Alert: Total paid sales for the month of September 2022 are the highest I’ve ever seen with 500+ and my paid sales for a single day was also the best ever with 270.

Over 10,000 orders for a single month is huge!

KENP Page Reads so far:

The majority of page reads come in for Open Evening with other books in the Order of the Following Series finding reads also as they are all on Kindle Unlimited.

Chart Movement

So selling hundreds of books across the world is kind of hard to keep track of in terms of chart movement so here’s the basic breakdown of the progress Open Evening made. The higher chart position, the more chance of newer eyes will see your product.

Further Results

Considering this post is just a week or so after the featured deal, the results are still happening. With a flurry of reviews and sales continuing for days. And that is the true mark of a good book promotion, results over time.

Just before the deal ran, Open Evening hit 50 Amazon ratings near enough on the 6th anniversary of its release and that proves my philosophy:

It is never too late for a book to find success, time is your friend. Keep going.

Thank you for reading. And for those considering some book promotion, a BookBub featured deal may be a good choice for you. Some genres are relatively affordable and for this featured deal I paid less than $300. The results are kind of a forever thing and that kind of stuff can’t be bought.

For some further reading and plenty of author marketing advice to help a fellow author or social media creative, my Patreon is the premier place for posts like this and they will be published there before anywhere else. Sign up now for less than the price of a coffee a month to access plenty of cool things.