Bargain book websites - how many copies do you really sell?

Bargain book websites offer to promote your book at a discounted rate to their lists of readers for a fee. This fee is often small, and with the opportunity for details of your book to land in 200k+ inboxes, you’d be crazy to pass the opportunity up. But how many book do you really sell? Does the money made from the books cover the cost of the promotion? Is the entire thing, very possibly, a bit of a scam?

TL;DR – results up front

In my experiment, every promotion made considerably less money in book sales than the cost of the promotion. However, some bargain book websites did perform better than others.

1st place: Book Barbarian
2nd place: Bargain Booksy
3rd place: Fussy Librarian
4th place: Booksends

Keep reading to see how I ranked the above, or just take it as read and stop reading here. Your choice.

The Archivist promotion – May 2023

My dark fantasy book The Archivist is available on KDP select. As I’m sure you know, this allows me to discount the price of the book from its regular retail price of $4.99 to a discount price for a five-day period.

I decided to set my price to $0.99 (the lowest option) in the hope that would result in the highest number of sales and push me up the rankings. The dates I selected were 25 to 29 May, nothing special, but they covered a weekend, which seemed important. I associate the week days for working and weekends for book buying, though perhaps that’s just me.

Next, I selected the bargain book websites to promote my book on:

Ideally I wouldn’t have had Bargain Booksy and Booksends on the same day as different days makes it easier to attribute the sales. However, I planned this bargain at the beginning of May and so there weren’t many spaces left.

Prices

Each of the bargain book websites offer slightly different prices for their promotions which is largely based on the number of readers they have in the genre you select. These prices are also a function of book price, with the $0.99 books typically cheaper. If you write cosy mysteries or pseudo-porn erotica, you’re in luck as they are the most popular genres. Sadly (or probably not sadly), that’s not what I write.

Book Barbarian: $40
Fussy Librarian: $29.20
Bargain Booksy: $45
Booksends: $85

The book

I don’t want to go on about my book too much here. Sure, I’d love you to be buy it, but I’ll politely ask at the end of the blog instead of shove it down your throat here. However, there are some useful data on the book that are relevant to sales, namely, cover and ratings.

At the time of the promotion, the book had the following ratings:

Amazon US: 4.3 (21 ratings)
Goodreads: 4.11 (35 ratings)

Sales

What were my expectations? Not high, that’s for sure. Self-publishing is a mighty humbling experience, and every time I set my expectations low, it turns out I’ve not set them low enough. This time was no exception. Honestly, I was hoping for around 100 sales over the five day period, but expecting between 50 and 80. As you’ll see, even the lower end of that estimate was a touch optimistic.

25 May: 9 books (Book Barbarian)
26 May: 3 books (Fussy Librarian)
27 May: 12 books (Bargain Booksy and Booksends)
28 May: 4 books
29 May: 0 books

These sales don’t look great. But wait, we’re going to do a little maths (strap yourselves in) and rate the bargain book sites using a simple scoring metric that considers cost and number of sales.

Scoring metric

The scoring metric used to rank the bargain book websites is simply profit/promotion cost. A value of one means the promotion broke even, less than one means the promotion made a loss and more than one means the promotion made a profit.

As the promotion price was set to $0.99, and the royalties I take are 70 %, I get a profit of $0.69 per sale. Therefore, the scoring metric becomes:

(0.69 * sales on the day)/promotion cost

Sales on the day is not a perfect score as someone could have seen the book advertised on one day and then bought it on the next. Also, there is the issue of two websites having their promotions on the same day. For Bargain Booksy and Booksends I will use upper (12 books) and meaningful lower (1 book) bounds for the number of sales on the day.

The rankings

The rankings below are calculated using the metric above. For Bargain Booksy and Booksends, the mean average of the range in used for the ranking.

1st place: Book Barbarian (score 0.155)
2nd place: Bargain Booksy (mean average score 0.100, range 0.015 to 0.184)
3rd place: Fussy Librarian (score 0.071)
4th place: Booksends (mean average score 0.053, range 0.008 to 0.097)

It’s important to remember that any score less than one means the promotion made a loss, so while Book Barbarian may have topped this list, they are essentially the best of a poorly performing bunch.

Why didn’t I sell many books?

These bargain book websites email their readers every day with discount deals on books they may be interested in. But how many of these emails go straight to spam, or are deleted without being read? And if they are being read, then how are the readers to know which books to choose? Just because you’re being bombarded every day with ebook delas doesn’t mean you buy 30+ $0.99 ebooks upon checking your emails in the morning. The issue, I suspect, is one that plagues self-publishing – there’s too much choice. Sure, you’re book may be great, but so are thousands of others. And even when you have your book promoted, it is often one of many being promoted that day. If you’re lucky, your book will be near the top of the list. Less lucky, and your book will down near the bottom.

Crucially, I think the issue is greed. The more books these website promote, the more money they make. Sure, they could promote one book a day, and that book would likely see great sales, but if they promote 50 books a day, that’s more money for them.

The primary omission from these websites are data on the number of sales. Some may give an indication as to how many books an author could expect to sell, but that’s nothing more than a wet finger in the air. I’d be more willing to trust (and spend my money on) a promotion website that provides verified data on the number of sales per promotion option for each genre.

Am I going to do this again?

Yes.

Firstly, I want more data. Perhaps May was a fluke and my next promotion will be a roaring success. I also want to see how changes in ratings (and the number of ratings) affects the success of my promotions. If I continue these for several years, and the number of ratings The Archivist has on Amazon increases, I believe I should see an increase in promotion sales. And if I do see that, I would like to quantify the magnitude of the effect. When I get more data, I’ll update this blog post so you can see how the number of sales changes over time.

The other reason for doing this again is; what other option do I have? Sure, Selling only 28 books was disappointing, but without the promotion I probably would have sold two in all of May.

Signing off

I hope you found this blog post useful. If I hadn’t experienced this first hand, it’s the kind of post I would have wanted to read, I just hope others feel the same way.

As I warned, I need to plug my book. I don’t do this a lot – which is probably why my sales are so low. However, if you enjoy dark fantasies about death, the supernatural, face-stealing demigods and foul-mouthed teenage girls, then perhaps The Archivist is for you. Check it out on Amazon.

VSN

V S Nelson