Promo sites and price drops
The discount-newsletter business is easy to describe. A site collects readers who want cheap books, sorts them by genre, and emails them a list every day. Authors pay for a slot on that list. The reader gets a bargain, the site gets a fee, and you get one day of concentrated attention you could not otherwise buy.
Everything that makes these sites worth using, or a waste of money, follows from what that day is actually doing.
The mechanism, plainly
You drop the price of a book for a short window. A site announces the drop to people who buy on price and have their reading device in the other hand. Those people buy, in a clump, on one day.
The clump is the point. A store's ranking and its recommendation lists run on recent sales relative to everything else selling at the same moment. A burst moves the book up those lists, and a book visible on a list gets bought by people who never saw the email and never heard of you. Those are the sales you did not pay for, and they are the whole return. The copies the newsletter itself sells, at a discount price, rarely cover the slot on their own.
That is why the promotion has to be concentrated. The same sales spread thinly over three weeks change nothing about where the book sits, because the store is comparing you against other books in the same hours. One day or two, everything pointed at the same window, is the difference between a promotion that pays for itself and an expensive discount.
The requirements are the filter
The sites worth paying attention to turn books down, and what they ask for is a useful checklist even if you never book one.
A professional cover. This is the first thing rejected and the least negotiable, because the site is putting your thumbnail in a grid beside nine other books and their subscribers judge the grid in seconds.
A number of existing reviews at a decent average. They want proof that readers who paid for the book did not regret it. A book with three reviews is not rejected out of spite; it is rejected because the site cannot tell yet.
A description that was written rather than summarized. The email copy is usually drawn from your listing. A blurb that recaps the plot gives them nothing to print.
Sometimes an exclusivity condition. Some sites will not take a book running another site's promotion the same day. Separately, free days on some stores exist only inside a program with its own conditions — read the current terms yourself before you plan around them.
Meeting that list is most of the work. A book that cannot meet it was not going to profit from the promotion anyway.
In the Cover Maker. The thumbnail check shows your cover at the size it appears in a promotion email's grid of covers, which is the size that decides whether a subscriber clicks. The ebook cover exports at 1600 × 2560 for the listing the click lands on. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Which sites are worth it
There are a handful of sites that reliably return more than they cost, and a long tail of sites that do not. The tail is long because the business is easy to start: a mailing list, a signup form, and a rate card. Names and fees change, so this guide gives you neither.
How to tell them apart does not change. Look for published results you can check — how many subscribers a genre list actually has, what books in your category sold on a given day — rather than testimonials on the site's own page. A site that will not tell you its list size by genre is telling you something. Ask other authors in your genre what a slot returned, in units, on a date. And book one slot on one site rather than a stack of small ones, because a stack gives you a result you cannot read.
Do the arithmetic before you book
Take the cost of the slot. Divide it by what you earn on one copy at the promotional price. That is how many copies the promotion must sell before it has broken even on paper, and you should decide whether that number is plausible before you pay, not afterwards.
For a standalone, that is the whole calculation, and it is a hard one to win. The discounted copies earn little, the list-visibility sales are the upside, and if the book does not climb, there is nothing else to collect.
For a first book in a series, it is a different calculation entirely. You are not trying to make the day profitable. You are buying readers into the front of a series and collecting the return on books two, three and four over the following weeks. Work out your read-through first — what share of book-one buyers go on to book two — because that ratio decides what a discounted first-book sale is worth to you, and without it you are guessing.
Two things that go wrong
The price change was not live. Price changes do not always take effect the moment you save them, and an email pointing at a full-price book is money spent on nothing. Change the price early, then open the listing yourself, in every store you are promoting, and confirm the number on the page before the send.
Free buys downloads, not readers. A free run moves a lot of copies and produces a big number that feels like a result. Many of those files are never opened. Free is a legitimate tool for the first book in a series, or for feeding a newsletter, and a poor one for anything you want paid for. Judge it on what happens to books two and three afterwards, not on the download count.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Tracking what actually works · More: Promotion after launch week · Advertising a book, honestly · Pricing a self-published book