Running a Successful Contemporary Romance eBook Promotion

How can you run a successful promotion for your Contemporary Romance e-book?

We dig into the topic by comparing randomly selected books in the 95th, 50th, and 5th percentiles of success. Since BookRaid tracks individual clicks through our email newsletter, we know exactly how many clicks each promotion receives.

Let's answer the following questions, and more:

• Is the cover the only thing that matters?
• Is it a good idea to flaunt your rating?
• Should you strive to have your book on all possible retailers, or is Amazon sufficient?
• How does “ALL CAPS CASING” fare versus “Title Case”?

Over 8000 authors have trusted BookRaid to promote over 31,000 books. This treasure trove of promotional data tells a story of its own.

Method of Analysis

We'll focus on e-books at a sale price of $0.99, and include only promotions in the Contemporary Romance category. This ensures that we're comparing apples to apples. Other romance subcategories may have different numbers of subscribers and select for different covers / descriptions.

Percentiles are calculated based on the number of clicks across all possible retailers.

For example, when we focus on e-books around the 95th percentile, we're looking at e-books that:

• Received more clicks than 95% of other books.
• Have clicks at any/all retailers (Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes and Noble).
• Are in the same set of categories.
• Are at the same sale price ($0.99, in this case).
• Were promoted on or after January 1st, 2022.

At lower percentiles, all the comparison criteria remain the same, just that we focus on a lower percentile in order to compare.

Promotions in the 95th Percentile

Scoring in the 95th percentile compared to any demographic of peers is an impressive feat.

What can we learn from these books?

Let's take a look at some top tier books:

Lessons Learned From This Cohort

These successful books have a few things in common:

• The cover graphics are very high quality and compelling.
• Title, subtitle, and author text is high contrast against the background.
• All books are available on all retailers.

Additionally, books may have helped their success by employing one or more of these strategies:

• Include reader testimonials in the description.
• Promote an entire series for (reader) cost savings.
• Show skin on the cover. Romance enthusiasts seem to love skin.

Promotions Around the 50th Percentile

These promotions are right at the peak of the bell curve: 50% of other promotions are above, while the other 50% are below.

These promotions still scored perfectly respectable numbers of clicks, but we won't share any book examples in order to respect the authors and their titles.

What did books in this cohort do wrong? What could they improve on? What difference between the top-tier books will you notice?

There are a couple patterns to note:

• Some covers lack a professional touch:
  • Less legible text, contrast and color clashing issues.
  • Plain stock imagery with no unique modifications made.
• May be promoted on only a subset of available stores.
• Confusing or long-winded descriptions.

Promotions Near the 5th Percentile

These promotions struggled to garner clicks in the newsletter. In some cases, it's clear why. Other times, less so. Still, lessons can be gleaned by recognizing similarities between these books or by comparing these promotions to the higher percentile promotions above.

We've chosen not to give any examples here to preserve the anonymity of the books and their authors.

In general, we noticed some combination of the following when looking at low engagement promotions:

• Book covers may…
  • Be less professional, contain design artifacts, rough cuts, etc.
  • Be harder to read.
  • Contain less original artwork (think basic stock imagery with no modifications).
• Descriptions may…
  • Be less clear to read.
  • Include plotlines that are hard to follow.
  • Not include testimonials, reviews, accolades, or ratings.

Additionally, of the books sampled from the 5th percentile, none of them were listed on multiple retailers.

Our Recommendations

Now that the results are in, how do you set your contemporary romance book up for an impactful promotion?

Cover Art

This is our number one determining factor for promotion engagement. A low-budget cover is the clearest sign that the author has yet to establish themselves. The unfortunate fact is that readers do judge books by their covers; especially in this media age, and especially in newsletters where the book is not known to the reader.

In the romance category, you may want to err on the racier side. Show some skin. Threaten a kiss. Bask in a moment of intimacy. Get the blood pumping.

Compelling Descriptions

It may be counterintuitive, but the description field is less of a description and more of a sales pitch.

One of the commonalities found on the top-tier books above is that they address the reader directly. This can be done via testimonials, citing the book's ratings, number of downloads, number of reads, etc.

It may be more important to prospective readers that the book, “has fifty thousand downloads,” than any plot point or summary.

That said, we do recommend a blend of the two.

We'll quote the description for Your Hand in Mine, which scored above the 95% percentile:

Descriptions from the 3rd Person?

Many of the books in top percentiles have descriptions that are (seemingly) written by third parties. These blurbs address the author or book as if written by a separate promotional company. We're wondering what difference this makes - we're not sure, but have noticed a loose correlation.

See copy like this:

And

One hypothesis is that the external perspective gives automatic credibility to the entry, like a foreword written by an external source.

Take this with a grain of salt, since we don't yet have stats to back our claims up.

Availability

We recommend making your book available on as many retailers as you can. Beyond the obvious increase in reach (based on devices and user base), we think there's a compounding effect.

If you're running a restaurant that has expanded to four neighboring towns, you will immediately be seen as more credible (maybe more delicious).

Conversely, if your restaurant is still at one location, it may be seen as more of a gamble. It's probably great food. After all, you oversee the whole operation! But users are notoriously fickle with their time and money and will congregate at proven establishments.

Take some time and distribute to the other platforms as soon as you're able.

A Detour: Capitalization of Titles

Occasionally, we get submissions where titles are written in ALL CAPS. This may be an attempt to draw attention to their promotion, or may be due to the caps lock key being stuck on (hah).

We often edit all-caps titles down to "Proper Case" versions, but a few have snuck through over the past year. You can see their distribution in the graph below, where 42 occurrences distribute over 2900 total promotions.

Overall, the average number of clicks on $0.99 promotions for books with ALL CAPS titles is 45, versus the global average of 54 clicks. That’s a penalty of 17% less clicks on average, just for capitalizing your title. While the data set is small, there is a sizable decrease in the number of clicks when all capital letters are used.

We do not recommend you write your titles in ALL CAPS, and will edit you back to the standard whenever we can.

Onward

There you have it.

Does this article give you a better sense for how to improve your promotion? Please let us know via our contact page.

Interested in more details on successful promotions? See our Author Resources page for more.