As almost all authors know by now, BookBub is the undisputed king of book promotion platforms. If you can get one of their coveted Featured Deals for your book, you are bound to sell a boatload of copies. However, getting one of those is extraordinarily difficult – at least in my experience. (I know some authors talk about getting BookBubs regularly, but I’m not one of those.) In fact, I’ve only had one BookBub Featured Deal, and that was more than 5 years back. But to be honest, I really didn’t start trying to get one in earnest until maybe two years ago.
Anyway, in addition to providing you with a dashboard to keep a tally of the many rejections they send you, BookBub also gives you an author profile. You can seen mine here; it’s actually pretty nice, although I can’t take any credit for that. (In truth, I’ve rarely paid attention to it.) However, one of the things you’ll notice on the page is the ability to recommend books to others.
A while back, BoobBub sent me an email saying that someone had recommended one of my novels on the site. I thought, “This great – and especially timely since I just got a bump in sales today, so anyone who checks out my work based on the recommendation will see the books at a higher rank.” I think maybe a few weeks later I got another notification, which I once again felt was fortuitous because it also happened to come on a day when I got more than the average number of sales. Lucky me!
Now as my wife will freely tell anyone, there are times when I can be incredibly dense. Case in point: when she told me that Baby #3 was on the way. (In my defense, she told me by giving my a travel-size pack of baby products. I simply took the gift at face value and refused to look for a deeper meaning. Needless to say, she was more direct when she told me about Baby #4…) With respect to BookBub, by the time I got notice of the third recommendation and saw the sales bump, I kinda had this thing figured out: the recommendations were driving the sales. How cool is that?
So it’s happened a couple of times since then, and on each occasion I’m grateful that readers think enough of me to recommend my work to others. It’s high praise, to say the least. Moreover, it’s nice to know that – even though I’m not getting Featured Deals from BookBub – their platform is still enabling me to move towards my goals as a writer. And in addition to recommendations, BookBub also lets my followers on their site (I’ve got 43 of ’em) know when I have a new release. (I think Amazon does the same thing, except I don’t have a clue how many followers I have there. The Great ‘Zon doesn’t share those numbers – it could be 2 or 2000.)
In short, it’s nice to know all of these cool things are going on behind the scenes and with little involvement from me. Mostly, however, it’s the result of readers being kind, thoughtful, and generous in their praise. There isn’t much that’s cooler than that for a writer, so thank you.