Running a Successful Fantasy eBook Promotion

One of our missions here at BookRaid is to deliver high quality content to readers.

Promotions that garner few clicks suggest that readers don't find these books appetizing. Too many low-quality books leads readers to unsubscribe from the newsletter.

How can we help authors at the lower end of the performance spectrum to increase their clicks and traction?

In our series on increasing the click-through rate on books, we'll focus here on the Fantasy genre and attempt to give pointed advice.

How the Newsletter Content Appears

To ground our analysis, consider this promotion which appeared in a newsletter back in 2021:

Importantly, promotions only have a few elements to attract readers. These will be our focus:

The book cover
The description (and title)
The retailers

Book Covers at the High End

The following books are the top performers in the Fantasy category at the 99 cent sale price:

It's clear from this set of books that the covers are very high quality. There's a decent mixture of photorealistic, illustrated, and high quality graphics.

All the covers above:

Have high text contrast and are properly legible.
Hint at the content/tone of the book.
Are highly professional.

Promoting a Series

You may have noticed that four of the ten top-tier promotions promote a series of books. We've left them in the results to show that trend, which makes intuitive sense. Readers are more likely to purchase if you're promoting a series under a single price point.

If you've got a series but are finding it hard to find traction on any one book alone, consider bundling them into a series and promoting them that way. This seems to be a good way to get eyes on your books.

How about the low-ranking covers?

Book Covers at the Lower End

We've blurred all text in the low-ranking book covers to preserve the anonymity of the authors, but here are the bottom ten performing Fantasy promotions at 99 cents from January 1st 2021 to June 2023:

Bottom ten Fantasy promotion covers, with blurred text

While some of the covers above seem quite high quality, a number of them do have reasonable critiques. Without identifying individual covers to critique, we do have some advice to offer:

Some covers have noticeably lower quality artwork. Perhaps 3-5 of the covers above fall into this category.

Some covers don't seem to fit the category of Fantasy. One in particular has a distinctly sci-fi feel, others hint more at historical or historical fiction. Others still could conceivably fit into a few different categories, though this may actually be true of the book's content.

While we've obfuscated the text on the covers, we did notice that some fonts are hard to read against the cover's background due to the text being too small or too similar in color to the background.

A couple covers above stood out to us as being high quality and seemingly undeserving of their low click-through rate. That brings us to their titles and descriptions.

Descriptions

Here we have to tread especially carefully as we want to discuss titles and descriptions of low-performing promotions without using any identifying characteristics of the titles.

Here’s the description of a low-performing book that we think had an expertly designed cover. We’ve swapped out anything identifiable, but left the gist:

480 BC. Eudoxus, bound in servitude to a Babylonian Governor, finds himself in the midst of a battle between deities and sorcery-wielding soldiers. The enigmatic fighter Gilgamesh and Ishtar, a potent enchantress, steer Eudoxus through a raging conflict that will transport him from the untamed Mongolian plains, across epochs to the military expeditions of Ptolemy the Conqueror and Classical Rome.

So what’s wrong here? Anything? If the cover seemed high quality, what about this description could have lowered the click-through rate?

Our feedback is simple: the book description is too complex. It’s hard to get your bearings. While such prose may appeal to some readers, perhaps it’s too dense for the majority of readers. Too many new names and places, and too many five dollar words packed in.

Here’s the same description, rewritten in a simplified form:

In 480 BC, Eudoxus, a servant to a Babylonian leader, finds himself in the middle of a battle between deities and sorcerer armies. Guided by a mysterious warrior, his journey takes him from the wild plains of Mongolia to the ancient battles of Rome, spanning both time and space.

Let’s critique one more description, again from a book with a seemingly top-tier cover. Again, this has been heavily edited to remove any identifying information while preserving the tone and themes:

An epic cultivation/progression Fantasy novel. Enter the (b)light. On a planet with a dying star, the Lightharnesser’s journey is vital for survival. Kael, a quarry worker, and Nia, a potion maker, must challenge society and pursue [a the](sic.) goal if they want to save Nashme from the dangers of war on a dying land.

What’s wrong here? A few things, we think.

Let’s start with the most obvious. There’s a typo in the description which we’ve marked with “(sic.)” above.

The catchphrase, “Enter the (b)light,” may be too cryptic for its own good. While it does correspond to some text on the book cover, it also degrades the description’s flow.

The first two sentences are not part of the plot, and could appear on their own line, perhaps at the end of the description. This would surface the more intriguing parts of the description.

The rest of the description seems fairly sound.

Retailers

The last piece of information to glean from the newsletter promotion is the retailer count.

In the promotion example at the top of this article, the book retailed only at Amazon. Apparently this didn’t stop it from amassing a ton of clicks.

Here’s another promotion, this time with all the retailers:

The ten promotions at the top of the heap had 3.4 retailers on average. The ten promotions at the bottom of the heap all had a single retailer: Amazon.

Digging Into the Retailers

In general, the more retailers that your book is available on, the more clicks it will accumulate. This is a simple mathematical truth, given that the promotion will reach more readers.

One hypothesis of ours is that a book with offerings at multiple retailers will do better on average due to the perceived increase in credibility. In other words, a reader is more likely to click through to your book because it seems better established when offered on several platforms.

We queried our database by comparing the number of Amazon-only clicks between books with one retailer versus all five retailers. Looking at promotions of any genre since the beginning of 2021, we found the following:

Free promos offered at only Amazon: Amazon clicks = 519.3
Free promos offered at all retailers: Amazon clicks = 669.0
An increase of 28.3%

Non-free promos offered at only Amazon: Amazon clicks = 46.5
Non-free promos offered at all retailers: Amazon clicks = 51.3
An increase of 10.3%

Our hypothesis, however, is not fully proven. The increase in clicks may be due to the fact that these multiple-retailer books are of a higher quality and therefore they get more clicks. This puts the emphasis back on the cover and description, as detailed above.

Thanks for reading!

We’re curious – was this information useful? Would you like to see similar articles for other genres?

Please let us know via our contact page.

Want more insights into running successful promotions? Catch our other articles on the Author Resources page.