Last week I had a BookBub deal for The Lost Sentinel. Sales were not as high as I expected, but still more than I could ever have reached alone.

If you’re thinking of BookBub as a viable marketing strategy, here are my results. Please note – this is book 1 in a completed trilogy. I reduced books 1 and 2 down to 99p each and left book 3 at full price.

I’ve sold over 500 books in April. This is a BIG deal to me! That equates to 349 new readers for The Lost Sentinel, 96 picked up book 2 at the discounted rate and 55 bought book 3 at full price. Plus a couple of other books were sold not relating to the Silent Sea Chronicles series. 11 Audiobooks were also purchased, which is a nice little bonus that I forgot about.

My pages read figure in KENP is higher than its been in a long time, and is rising every day. I hope these readers find book 1 compelling enough to move straight onto later books in the series.

I have only gained 3 new ratings on GR and no new reviews. That is a disappointment but maybe more will trickle in over time. It did only run last week so I can’t expect too much too soon.

I was excited to reach number #7 in the kindle chart in Canada, though it would have been great to reach the No. 1 bestseller slot as I did with the previous BookBub deal.

My final thoughts;

I would recommend Bookbub deals to authors if they can afford to run them, and are lucky enough to be selected (which is very hard!). I will try again when I release a new series, but only once I have several books that the readers can pick up to really make the most of the promo. Other email subscription sites like Book Barbarian seem to have run their course for The Lost Sentinel – I think the readers have all seen it before, or these email ad sites are just not as effective as they used to be.

What are your experiences with running ads like Book Barbarian and Book Cave? Do you still buy books this way? Have you run the email subscription ads and seen good results, or no real change in your sales?

Please share you thoughts on reaching new readers. Or if you’re a reader rather than an author how do you discover new books?

Until next time…