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There are hundreds sites that offer to promote your book in a myriad of ways – free and discounted ebook deals to their subscribers, early reviews, online databases and more.
It's beyond our means to keep up to date with every service out there. If you're considering using a service, we recommend you do your research. Reedsy have an excellent free and paid book promotion database.
We use NetGalley regularly, there are many more that we use very occasionally, and even more we haven't tried.
Most online marketing services have numerous genre-specific email lists. Publishers and authors can submit a discounted book to be included on an emailed newsletter, but there is a cost, minimum criteria and, for some lists, heavy competition for spaces. The cost of being featured varies considerably, depending on the platform, genre, and price of the book.
We do submit selected books to some of these sites. This will depend on fulfilling the site requirements (e.g. number of quality reviews). For instance, we may submit a book when it hits a sales target of 500 copies, triggering another round of publicity, or at the 3-month review stage, depending on the level of reviews. The newsletters link to the books on Amazon, and we arrange for the price to be reduced to the promotional price (generally $0.99 – 1.99) before the newsletter goes out. We do not offer free books ourselves, and focus on the larger ones, with titles that have been well reviewed. But authors can also use these sites to promote books. You can request the accompanying discount price on the author forum, but we will need two months' notice.
There are no guarantees as to how many people will download your book, and well-known names obviously do much better. The downloads you do get could lead to other sales through word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews, but again, there are no guarantees.
If you choose to use one of these services yourself make sure you always promote your book in a newsletter whose subject matches your book's categories. Failing to do so could disrupt your Amazon sales. To find out why, see CHAPTER 15: The Importance of Amazon Also-Boughts.
