There are plenty of book promotion websites on which you can advertise your free eBook and Kindle countdown deal. Some of these will amass no sales or downloads, some will only make a dent, others will make you a sizeable profit. The majority of promotional websites will ask you to pay a fee. These fees can add up and there’s no guarantee you’ll recuperate the costs by making a tidy profit.
If your budget is small, I wouldn’t advise that you spend hours, or days, submitting to every promo website. Submit to the free book promotion websites first or find a website that will charge you one fee to submit to a list of selected websites in one go. I should point out that some of these websites will require a certain number of good reviews before they will promote it. Some will ask you for the name or the company who professionally edited your book.
The best days to run book promotions are Sundays and Mondays.
Small promotion websites versus the big boys
I once submitted my free Kindle promotion to almost every free and low cost book promotion website I could find online; the costs mounted up, the downloads – not so much. When I changed tactic and submitted to a couple of the pricier book promotion websites, along with a few Fiverr deals, I had downloads in the thousands, turned a profit, and experienced steady sales for several months thereafter.*
Big boys
These are the promo sites that can net you over a thousand downloads as oppose to a few hundred.
There is a waiting time and a sizeable fee. They don’t always say yes, but if they do, you can climb up the Amazon rank list pretty quickly.
A word of caution: they will want to know if your book deal is flexible. Therefore, I would approach them first before scheduling any promos on any other sites.
You can expect a couple of thousand downloads for popular genres. My paranormal fiction did well in this promo. I would also recommend Book Gorilla.
Here, you can find a list of book promotion websites.
*At present, I’m unable to list every book promotion website I have used. It’s also difficult to establish which of these websites nets you the most downloads if you’re signed up to several at once. You also need to consider that some genres are more popular than others.
Free giveaways for physical copies
If you want to promote your novel and gain reviews, you may want to consider giving your book away for free.
Don’t go crazy giving away physical copies of your book as you’ll want to keep costs down.
Run a contest on your own website and offer a couple of signed copies of your book as a prize. If the contest winners enjoy your book, they may post a review and spread the word about it to their friends and family as well as on social media.
There are plenty of book blogging sites which will help promote your book on their website, if you offer it as a giveaway. Ensure that you run your giveaway on websites relevant to your book, so that it finds its way to the right reader.
Goodreads allows you to run contests for your book giveaways. Signed copies always go down well.
Amazon has a similar feature. You can run promotional giveaways on their website for the physical books you have on sale.
You should also consider giving free copies to schools (if suitable) or donating a few copies to your local library.
Biography S.K. Holder was born in Kent. She currently resides in Essex. She graduated from the London Metropolitan University with a degree in Social Sciences & Computer Studies. She is a member of the Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators.