Successfully Promoting an eBook in Any Genre
We've completed thorough analyses on high performing promotions in Fantasy, Contemporary Romance, and Thriller categories. If you haven't seen those articles yet, they're worth the read.
Here, we summarize those findings and generalize them to work for any genre of book.
We'll look at the following facets of the promotion:
Covers
High quality covers seem to be the clearest defining feature of top performing promotions. A low quality cover suggests to the reader that the book or author is not yet well established.
While it unfortunately takes time and/or money to have a high quality cover produced, we're convinced that it's the best way to get readers onto your opening page.
We've collected the top ten book covers across different categories, determined by number of clicks in the newsletter:
Make no mistake, these are top-notch covers. What makes for an exceptional book cover, though? We boil it down to five key points
- Legibility: Title and author's name clearly readable.
- Relevance: Reflects book's content, mood, and genre.
- Originality: Unique, distinctive, and memorable design.
- Professionalism: High-quality, well-executed artwork and typography.
- Simplicity: Conveys message effectively without being cluttered.
Since book covers are so important, low quality covers are main reason our submission vetters reject promotions.
Titles
Coming up with a title can be challenging! In general, it's tough for us to tell whether high or low click-through rates are due to the book's title. Regardless, here are some attributes of a good book title:
- Memorable: A good title is easy to remember. It should ideally be unique and catchy so that it stands out in a reader's mind.
- Relevant to the Content: The title should give some indication of the book's content or theme. It doesn't have to be literal, but it should be related in some way to the book's story or main idea.
- Engaging: A good title piques the reader's interest and makes them want to start reading. From the books in the list above, “The Other Sister” really exemplifies this point.
- Appropriate Length: While there's no hard and fast rule, shorter titles are generally easier to remember and more impactful. Longer titles can work, however, if they are compelling and easy to read.
- Easy to Pronounce: Titles that are difficult to pronounce or confusing might deter some readers. Easy-to-pronounce titles are more likely to be shared by word of mouth.
- Genre-Appropriate: The title should fit with the conventions of its genre. For example, a thriller might have a title that suggests suspense and danger, while a romance might have a title that suggests love, longing, or relationships.
- Avoids Clichés: While it's important to fit with genre conventions, a good title should also avoid clichés. It should feel fresh and original, not like a rehash of existing titles.
Short vs Long Titles
We've long held the suspicion that longer titles were less attractive to our readers.
This hypothesis was recently given credence as we compared title lengths to average number of clicks across all 32000+ promotions in our database:
Our advice here is simple:
- Keep it short.
- If you have a subtitle, leave it out or put it in your description.
Capitalization of Titles
During our deep dive into successful contemporary romance promotions, we summarized the differences in clicks between promotions with ALL CAPITALIZED titles vs Title Case titles. We found that titles with proper casing outperformed all-capitalized titles in every price category, sometimes by a wide margin.
The MLA Style Manual agrees: “Write the title in Title Case (standard capitalization), not in all capital letters”.
Descriptions
In our genre-specific analyses on promotions in the Fantasy and Thriller genres, we identified good and bad trends using actual and obfuscated descriptions.
Here, we summarize the important points:
Hook the Reader: Start with a compelling sentence or two that grabs the reader's attention and makes them want to know more.
Introduce the Main Characters and Conflict: Give a brief introduction to the main characters and the primary conflict or challenge they face. Avoid going into too much detail about subplots or minor characters. Also avoid introducing too many characters or environments as it may overwhelm.
Set the Tone and Genre: The description should give a sense of the book's tone (is it serious, humorous, dark, light-hearted?) and genre. This helps potential readers know if it's the kind of book they would enjoy.
End with a Bang: Conclude the description with a powerful sentence or question that leaves readers wanting to know more. This could be a cliffhanger, a rhetorical question, or a bold statement about the book's themes or characters.
Include your Accolades: If your book has high ratings, you may want to include this detail in the description. Similarly, if you've ever received an award on this book or any other, distinguish yourself by adding that to the description.
Multiple Retailers
BookRaid supports promoting books at the following retailers:
- Amazon
- Barnes and Noble
- Google Play
- iBooks
- Kobo
It's obvious that promoting your book in more stores will lead to more sales.
What's less obvious, is that simply having a presence at additional stores will lead to more clicks on any one store.
The Multiplying Effect of Multiple Retailers
Consider the same book running two separate promotions:
- The book is promoted on Amazon alone.
- The book is promoted on all five retailers.
Our data suggests that the clicks through to the Amazon store alone will be higher in the latter scenario. Looking at promotions of any genre from the beginning of 2021 to mid 2023, 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%
We have two hypotheses as to why this might be the case:
First, we think that showing availability on multiple retailers increases the perceived credibility and this raises the reader's confidence that this click will produce a good read.
Second, it stands to reason that books available on all five retailers are indeed more mature, more successful, and more established in general. These books may simply be of a higher quality on average, and therefore amass more clicks.
In any case, if you're able to get your book on all the various retailers, we think it's worth the trouble.
Bundling Series
In our graphic showing the top-10 covers, only a single promotion (The Unveiled Academy) comprised a series. In reality, many of the performing promotions were bundled series.
We mostly left those promotion graphics out because they didn't contribute to our discussion on covers. Comparing book series “cover” images is the topic for another discussion.
Of the top 20 promotions with paid sale prices, nine of them were boxed sets containing anywhere from two to ten books.
If it makes sense for you to bundle your books into a set, then you may want to try this angle. It seems to make an outsized difference on the number of clicks and exposure you'll get.
In some cases, it may even make sense for an author to intentionally break their storylines and books into multiple parts. While this approach may carry downsides such effort and misalignment with your standard practices, we can see a couple potential upsides:
- Series suggest success
“Oh, this book has four parts. The first three must have done well” - Perceived value for money
“Wow, I'm getting four books for the price of one”
Free vs Paid Sales
There are pros and cons to promoting a sale price of “free” vs promoting a non-zero sale price.
Free Book Promotion
Free book promotions collected an average of 536 clicks on average in the last year. This amount is over ten times more than paid promotions over the same period (51).
Pros
- Higher Download Numbers: Free books are likely to get a lot more downloads, which can help boost the book's ranking on the platform's free books list.
- Increased Exposure: With more downloads, there's a higher chance of getting reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, and increased visibility.
- Series Introduction: If the book is part of a series, offering the first book for free can entice readers to purchase the subsequent books.
- Cross Promotion: If the reader loves the free introduction, they may want more from the same author and spend on the paid offerings.
Cons
- No Direct Revenue: You won't earn any money from the free downloads during the promotion.
- Lower Perceived Value: Some readers associate freewith lower quality, though this potentiality doesn't seem to outweigh reader's urge to click for free books.
$0.99+ Promotions
Promotions at a sale price of 99 cents collected an average of 51 clicks on average in the past year. This amount is about 1/10th the average clicks garnered on free promotions (536).
Pros
- Revenue Generation: Even though it's a small amount, you'll earn some revenue from each sale.
- Higher Perceived Value: A book priced at 99 cents may be perceived as having more value than a free book.
- Lower Download Numbers: A 99 cent price tag, while low, may deter some readers, resulting in fewer downloads compared to a free promotion.
Cons
- Lower Download Numbers: A 99 cent price tag, while low, may deter some readers, resulting in fewer downloads compared to a free promotion. Free books are downloaded by approximately 10x more newsletter subscribers.
If you're looking to maximize exposure and don't mind the lack of direct revenue, a free promotion may be the way to go.
If you want to generate some revenue and potentially boost your paid ranking, a 99 cent promotion might be a better fit.
Curious how these rules apply to specific genres of books? See our Author Resources page for more.