This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Happy Post-Thanksgiving! If you are coming to this program after having experienced Thanksgiving in the United States yesterday, or perhaps a few days ago, depending on when you're listening, I hope it was a good day. Today is that day known as Black Friday, which ironically has become a holiday all over the world. Isn't that weird? Thanksgiving is an American holiday, also a Canadian holiday one month earlier. And of course lots of people are
familiar with it, but now they're very familiar with Black Friday because of all the shopping. And I don't actually have a Black Friday special for you today because I don't have anything for sale. Maybe I should work on that since I talk about it every day for other people's projects. Okay, I'll make a note. But today, we have a lot of authors and aspiring authors out there, not just today, but generally speaking, this is the segue. In one way or another,
they're all looking to get their books into the hands of more people. So if you've written a book, you know, what do you want most? You want more people to read your book. You want to sell that book, of course, but mostly you want distribution. You want people to be able to access the work that you have put so much time into. And I understand that because I'm an author,
you know, like I want to know the same thing. And sometimes there's some mystery to this, like to be totally candid, sometimes a book takes off and sometimes it doesn't and you don't always know why. Like I see a lot of books that are really successful. And I think, okay, that person deserves their success, no critique of them. But there's also a lot of other books from other people that I think are really well done. But for whatever reason, they just haven't been able to
kind of break through and such. You know, this year, I had a book come out called The Money Tree. It's actually my favorite book that I've written, the book that is probably the most personal to me out of seven books so far. And with COVID, it's been tough to get out the message. And so for the past few months, I've been kind of like, okay, you know, what do I do? How do I adjust and so on?
Because there's always a way to move forward in some fashion. But hey, this isn't about me. We're going to talk about you or we're going to talk specifically about one of our callers. She is writing a romance series and looking for promotional ideas. Now specifically, she's wondering if she should pay a service that markets ebooks to a large audience to promote her debut. So we're
gonna talk about the specific service, what you might need to know if you're interested in it, as well as hopefully something that is applicable to everyone, or at least to most people. So thank you for listening. Here's a quick message on behalf of our sponsor. And then the question, should I use a service to promote my new romance series? Hi, Chris, this is Megan, and I'm writing a modern romance series and one I promoted on Amazon. Where else should I be promoting it? I've heard about a service called book bub that
advertises ebook sales to millions of people. It's expensive and it looks like they don't approve every request. But they also have a lot of success stories and positive testimonials. What do you think about this service? And what are some other ways to promote a new series? The goal is to get
as many people as possible to read the first one, even if I don't make much money from it, because then readers will get hooked and want to keep going. Thanks for your help, Chris. Megan, congratulations on the new book and the forthcoming series. This question reminded me of very first year of side hustle school, we had some ads that I ran for Audible. And I use those ads to promote a whole series of romance books. I was like, what are Chris Gilbo's favorite romance titles?
So I found all these books and my favorite was Reckless in Texas. I don't actually know that books author, I don't have any relationship with them. But I was like Reckless in Texas, everybody go out and get it. There's also a book called side hustle that is a single dad romance. So I wrote a book called side hustle that is not a single dad romance. The subtitle is from idea to
income in 27 days. It's actually kind of like the stuff I talk about here. But then a year and a half after mine came out. There was another one I saw with the same title, just you know, slightly different genre. And they didn't even ask me to be the cover model. So I was a little bit offended.
But just to stay on topic here, let's focus specifically on book bub. Okay, I've had lots of other episodes talking about general book advice. I love the focus on book bub. They are actually a worthwhile service. If you can get accepted, as Megan mentioned, they don't take everybody. And if you can pay for it. So for everyone who's like, well, what is this thing?
It's a company that maintains a group of very large mailing lists of readers. They have something like 10 million people on various mailing lists. And every day, they're sending out newsletters with featured deals and other promotions. These lists are subdivided by category based on what people like to read. So if you're into gardening, you sign up for the gardening list, and you're going to get all kinds of, you know, promotions and discounted ebook deals for on books about gardening and perhaps, you know, related, it might be like home and garden, it might be, you know, cooking or something like that. But the key is all the books that they promote are ebooks. And
they're all heavily discounted. Okay, so this is key. There's a lot of different options in terms of how much it costs for what you get and so on. But you really want what's called a featured deal. And that's what gets prominent placement. So the cost for that varies depending on the size of the
sub lists, you know, how big is gardening or business or whatever your genre is, and the price of your ebook. And interestingly, the lower that you price your ebook, the lower the price that book club charges authors or publishers. So here's a specific example from the romance category, contemporary romance, because of course, there's lots of sub genres in romance, contemporary romance, it costs $650 for a featured deal. If your ebook is free, it costs $1,600. If your book costs between one and $2. And it costs $3,000, actually $3,346. If it costs $3 or more. And you're
like, wow, that's actually a lot of money. Well, it is a lot of money. But they estimate that for a free ebook in this category, romance is a really big category. On average, that free ebook will receive more than 30,000 downloads. And if it's not free, if it's one that's for sale for a low price, it will produce an average of 2500 sales. So if you're wondering what those numbers mean,
like what is the significance there? Well, the short version is they're pretty good numbers, they're actually really good. You know, most authors are not going to sell 2500 copies of their book. And even if you have a free book, it's pretty hard to get 30,000 people to download it. So this service or anything else like it, it's not for everyone, of course. As I said,
they're also selective about what they promote for those featured deals. But if you are interested in promoting your self published book, and you have a little bit of budget to work with, I do think it is probably worth looking at. So if you're interested in that, just go to bookbub.com, click the partner section at the bottom. And this is not an advertorial or sponsored content in any way. Just to be clear, I have no relationship with bookbub. Alright, listeners,
if you've got a question, could be about a totally different topic. We're looking at all kinds of stuff this year, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll continue to roll them out. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I hope something will be helpful to you. I hope
you take action on it. And I hope you'll keep listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
