#selfpub – Hayley Reese Chow

After non-figurative years of submitting to BookBub, my YA fantasy, Odriel’s Heirs got selected for a $0.99 US-only BookBub Deal in their YA category! Huzzah! 🥳 So for any other prospective BookBubbers out there, here’s the skinny on how it went.

First of All: What is a BookBuB Deal?

Basically you pay a fee (the amount differs depending on your genre), and BookBub will feature your book in their newsletter and on their website when it’s on sale. You can only apply once a month for the chance, and it’s not super easy to get accepted.

However, a cursory google search will tell you that BookBub is essentially the most successful/effective/biggest promotional newsletter used by both traditionally published and indie authors. So yeah, as an indie author floundering around on how to market my books, this was definitely something I wanted to check out. I’d gotten an international deal before and the results are here.

My strategy

Get the BookBub deal and run (i.e. I had no strategy.)

Some people try to buy a bunch of other newsletter promos at the same time to get their book higher in amazon’s rankings or on one of the bestseller lists. I did not do this. I’d done a lot of newsletter promos in the past, so I wasn’t sure it’d be worth the investment for me… also, I kind of wanted to see how BookBub did on its own.

The deal was run on 1 September, and since I did essentially no other promotions during September, the month’s results you see are basically due to BookBub. Yay for less variables!

I will add that I kept my books $0.99 all month on Amazon, and on the other retailers I track through Draft-to-Digital, all my books other than Odriel’s Heirs were free (and now they’re all free.) Likewise, my paperbacks are all $8.01 or less. I do this because my main goal in self-publishing is exposure, not profit, but your goals and strategy may be different!

Also, just as a head’s up. Odriel’s Heirs is the first of a series with three sequels available and one up for preorder. My other book, The Gatekeeper of Pericael, (a middle-grade fantasy) is not related.

GIVE me the numbers!

Cost: $202

Draft to Digital September Earnings: $31.28
54 x Odriel’s Heirs (0.99)
12 x Burning Shadows (free)
13 x Idriel’s Children (free)
3 x The Gatekeeper of Pericael (free)

Amazon September Earnings: $143.67
286 x Odriel’s Heirs (0.99)
2 x Burning Shadows (0.99)
84 x Idriel’s Children (0.99)
6 x Night of Ash (0.99)

Amazon Preorder Increase: $30.80
11 x Time’s Orphan (3.99)

Audible September Earnings: ~$10.00
2 x Odriel’s Heirs
2 x Idriel’s Children
1 x The Gatekeeper of Pericael

Units sold in September: 476
Total Earned in September: $215.75
Profit: $13.75

(For reference, I sold 12 books in August on Amazon, so yeah, this was a 40x increase for this small potatoes writer.)

Ratings Increase: 3-4ish on both Goodreads and Amazon. (Hoping these will trickle in longterm)

BookBub Followers: +30 (ish)

Highest Amazon Rank Hit: I actually don’t know because I was mostly out of cell service for this day, and I didn’t even screenshot what I saw. So on brand. 😅

Goodreads Difference:

So, was it worth it?

For me, it was obviously worth it. I only made a few bucks, but I gained hundreds of potential readers, and absolutely achieved my goal of increased exposure.

However, it was pretty close, so if I hadn’t had sequels and multiple books, I wouldn’t have broken even. Also, please keep in mind, BookBub results will definitely be different for every book in every genre, so this is just my experience.

But basically if you want to invest in exposure, I’d definitely give a shot! (And I will definitely be applying again for my future books.)

Bonus round: How to increase your chances of getting a bookbub deal

This is tough, because they don’t tell you why they select your book, but here is the list of criteria that they officially publish. Everything else is just my speculation.

Reviews: Both on Amazon & Goodreads that will reassure readers that people have enjoyed your book. I had over 100 on Amazon and 150+ on Goodreads. (How do you get reviews… well that’d need a different post, but I’d start with the ARC reading sites here.)

An Awesome Cover: My new covers are by Fay Lane, and they look sharp. But I also have another post here on some other cover artists I’ve been impressed with that might not break the bank completely.

Awards: Odriel’s Heir was the winner of the 2020 Florida Indie Author Project (which is free to enter and I highly recommend) and a finalist in the 2021 Book Blogger Novel of the Year Award (which is $20 to enter and I also highly recommend). That’s stated both on my the book page itself, and I put it in the comments of my BookBub application.

Heavy Discounts: For exposure purposes, I usually try to keep my books as cheap as possible… but for BookBub, I kept Odriel’s Heirs at 2.99 so I could discount it significantly for the deal. When I go for my next deal, I will probably make it 3.99 to increase my chances further.

Going Wide: I’ve heard this significantly increases your chances, so this is actually why I went wide with my books. Draft-to-Digital made the process seamless, but also has some drawbacks. That’ll need another post though.

Perseverance: I got rejected many, many, many times before finally getting accepted. It totally depends on who else is applying at the same time as well as the other factors. And it doesn’t cost anything to apply every month, so definitely give it a shot, and keep trying!

That’s all I can think of for now, but if you have more questions, definitely let me know!

Thanks for reading!

Well, it’s that time again! Time to look back on the year and see what worked, what didn’t, and how this whole writing thing is going. The review is important to me to make sure I’m still enjoying the process and see where I can do better.

In most of these self-publishing posts, I often mention how important it is to define what success means to us, measure ourselves in growth, and shooting for obtainable goals. But I also want to be transparent about my experience as a small-time self-pubbed writer.

So in this post, I’ll give a quick snapshot of my numbers, and and then in part two, I’ll talk more about the specific highlights and lessons learned.

The cold hard Numbers

Not much to write home about here. I sold:
15 hardcovers
93 ebooks
73 paperbacks
3,988 pages in KU
20ish* audiobooks
Total: 214ish copies

I’ve given away:
4,545 ebooks
38 paperbacks
179 audiobook promo codes
Total: 4,762 copies (not counting eARCs)

And my Goodreads review counts are currently at:
Odriel’s Heirs: 4.36 stars, 134 ratings / 109 reviews
The Gatekeeper of Pericael: 4.07 stars, 82 ratings / 75 reviews
Burning Shadows: 5 stars, 11 ratings / 8 reviews
Idriel’s Children: 4.29 stars, 42 ratings / 36 reviews
Total: 4.29 stars / 273 ratings / 228 reviews
(Thanks so much to everyone who took time to read and review—this means SO much to me!)

Which brings me to a whopping:
$183.82(ish)
(Thank goodness for a solid day job! 😅)

So, yeah. Like I said—small potatoes writer over here just trying to grow and have a good time. 😂 So I try to keep my expectations low and look on the bright side. I put three more books out in the world this year, got more sales and reviews in 2021 than I did in 2020, I learned a lot, and I had a good time doing it. There’s still obviously a lot to learn, but I’d still call it a good year. 😊

But I also wanted to measure the year in another way…

*This is so hard to measure, because ACX lumps in your redeemed promo codes as ‘sales’ so this is purely a guess based on royalties…which are also counted in a variety of ways. Honestly it could be anywhere from 6-50 copies.

The warmer, fuzzier numbers

So, I’m constantly thinking about how to measure writing growth and goals, but it wasn’t until I was trying to estimate what I could accomplish in 2022, that a very simplistic idea dawned on me.

Successful authors often give some version of the advice that the best way to get better at writing, is to just keep writing. So, of course, the answer should have been obvious. I should measure my growth in words.

There are a lot of you who are probably looking at the screen like: 🙄 well duh, girl.

But I think this is trickier than it seems, because I’m not just talking about the words we write. I can usually write a book in 3 months, but it takes another 9 months (and countless rereads) to revise, edit, and polish…not to mention querying.

So, I think we need to not only count the words we write but also those that we revise, query, and publish (and if you have more steps in your process, then count those too!). Add them all together, and then we can get a feel for what we really accomplished in this writing year.

For comparison. I’m also adding 2020, since I didn’t do this last year. (Also… I’m not adding flash fiction – it’s too hard to keep track of.)

2020:
Words written: 10,000(ish) + 10,000(ish) + 78,242 = 98,242 (1 complete, 2 partials)
Words revised: 50,581 + 74,948 = 125,529 (2 books)
Words published: 74,083 (1 book)
Words queried: 50,581 (1 book)
Total: 348,435 words

2021:
Words Written: 20,828+94,328+21,013 = 136,016 (2 books, 1 WIP)
Words Revised: 20,828+78,242+94,328 = 193,398 (3 books)
Words Published: 20,828+50,581+78,242 = 149,651 (3 books)
Books Queried: 74,948 (1 book)
Total: 554,013 words

Now, that’s an interesting comparison! I really didn’t know 2021 was more productive than 2020. And while I’m sure there are a lot of reasons behind this, I know it’s in part because I made some important realizations as a writer this year that have really helped me grow and become more purposeful and efficient in my process. (Which I’ll take on in the next post.)

Of course, however the numbers are tallied, our writing year is not just a number. And, we can’t realistically increase that word count every year. Eventually we’re going to cap out. Even looking forward to my goals for next year, I don’t think I’ll get anywhere close to this year.