BookBub has 15 million email subscribers. These are not casual browsers or social media scrollers. They are people who specifically signed up to receive daily book recommendations in genres they selected. They open their emails. They click. They buy.
BookBub's average email open rate exceeds 30%. Roughly triple the industry average for marketing emails. Their click-to-purchase rates are among the highest in digital marketing. When BookBub features your book, hundreds or thousands of copies can sell in a single day.
Despite this, most self-published authors either do not know BookBub exists or treat it as an unattainable luxury reserved for established authors. Both assumptions are wrong. The free author profile is available to everyone. The featured deal program is competitive but accessible. And BookBub's advertising platform lets you reach their audience even without a featured deal.
I set up BookBub author profiles for our entire catalog. Here is how the platform works and how to use every free and paid feature it offers.
The Free Author Profile
Every author can create a free profile at bookbub.com/partners. This is the foundation of everything else on the platform.
Your author profile includes:
- Author photo and bio. Standard author branding. Keep the bio concise and focused on what readers get from your books.
- Book listings. All your books displayed with covers, descriptions, and direct purchase links. BookBub pulls from major retailers automatically, but verify the links are correct.
- Follower button. BookBub members can follow your author profile. This is the most valuable feature on the platform.
- New release alerts. When you publish a new book, every one of your followers receives an email notification. This is not a social media post that 5% of your audience sees. This is a direct email to every follower, delivered by BookBub's infrastructure with their established sender reputation.
The follower alert system alone makes the free profile worth setting up. Every follower you accumulate becomes a guaranteed notification recipient for every future book. Compare this to social media, where platform algorithms throttle your reach to a fraction of your following, or to your own email list, where deliverability issues and spam filters reduce actual inbox placement.
BookBub's email deliverability is among the best in the industry because they have spent years building their sender reputation. Your new release alert rides on that reputation.
How to Build Followers
BookBub followers accumulate through several channels:
Your existing audience. Add a "Follow me on BookBub" link to your website, email signature, and social media profiles. BookBub provides a direct follow link at bookbub.com/authors/your-author-name. Your existing readers are the easiest followers to convert because they already know and like your work.
BookBub features and ads. Every time your book appears in a BookBub feature or ad, readers who purchase or save your book can discover and follow your author profile. This creates a compounding cycle: features drive followers, followers drive future launch sales, strong launch sales improve your chances of future features.
Cross-promotion. Other BookBub authors in related genres can recommend your profile to their followers through BookBub's recommendation features. Find authors who write complementary content and propose mutual recommendations.
Book back matter. Include a "Follow me on BookBub" call-to-action in the back matter of every book, alongside your website and email list links. Readers who just finished your book are at peak interest. Give them a one-click way to stay connected.
Featured Deals: The Power Move
BookBub's Featured Deals are the platform's flagship product. When your book is selected as a Featured Deal, it is promoted to BookBub's subscriber list in your genre categories. The volume of sales from a single Featured Deal can range from several hundred to several thousand copies, depending on genre and price point.
How Featured Deals Work
You submit your book for consideration through BookBub's partner dashboard. Include the book, the promotional price (free, $0.99, $1.99, or $2.99 are most common), the dates you want to run the promotion, and which retailers will have the discounted price.
BookBub's editorial team reviews every submission and selects books based on:
- Cover quality. Professional covers are essential. BookBub rejects books with amateurish cover design regardless of content quality.
- Reviews. A minimum of 15-20 reviews on Amazon is the practical threshold for nonfiction. More reviews improve your chances.
- Average rating. Books below 4.0 stars rarely get accepted.
- Price discount. The deeper the discount, the more attractive the deal is to readers and to BookBub's editors.
- Genre fit. Your book must fit clearly into one of BookBub's genre categories.
The Cost
Featured Deals are not free. BookBub charges the author a fee to feature the book, and the fee varies by genre and price point. Nonfiction categories typically range from $50 (for a free book promotion) to $500+ (for a $2.99 promotion in a large category). The fee covers BookBub's editorial curation and email distribution.
The math usually works. If a $0.99 featured deal generates 1,000 sales, you earn about $350 in royalties (at Amazon's 35% rate for sub-$2.99 pricing) and gain 1,000 new readers who may buy your other books at full price. If even 10% of those readers purchase a second book from your catalog at $9.99, that is an additional $700 in royalties. The lifetime value of a BookBub-acquired reader typically exceeds the cost of the feature.
Improving Your Acceptance Rate
BookBub's acceptance rate for Featured Deals is reportedly around 10-20%. To improve your odds:
- Submit regularly. BookBub tracks submission history and gives preference to persistent authors
- Time your submission for periods of lower competition in your genre
- Ensure your Amazon listing is optimized with A+ Content, strong reviews, and a professional cover before submitting
- Consider running a pre-submission price promotion to boost recent sales velocity, which BookBub's editors can see
BookBub Ads: Targeted Reach Without a Featured Deal
Even if your book is not selected for a Featured Deal, you can reach BookBub's audience through their self-serve advertising platform. BookBub Ads let you target readers by:
- Genre interest. Target readers who have expressed interest in specific genres
- Author interest. Target readers who follow specific authors (including competitors or complementary authors)
- Past engagement. Target readers who have clicked on previous BookBub features in your category
The ad format is a simple image ad (your book cover works well) that links directly to your book's purchase page on any retailer. Pricing is CPC (cost per click), and CPCs on BookBub tend to be lower than Amazon Advertising because the audience is smaller but more purchase-ready.
For our catalog, BookBub Ads targeting readers who follow personal finance and real estate authors produced CPCs of $0.25-$0.50. Significantly below Amazon Advertising CPCs for the same keywords, which typically run $0.80-$1.50.
The Recommendation Algorithm
BookBub's recommendation engine works on a reader preference model. When members sign up, they select genres of interest and rate books they have read. BookBub's algorithm then recommends books based on genre match, reading history, and engagement patterns.
For your book to appear in algorithmic recommendations (separate from Featured Deals and ads), it needs:
- Accurate genre categorization. Make sure your book is tagged correctly on BookBub and on the retailers BookBub pulls data from
- Strong engagement signals. Click-through rates on any previous BookBub exposure, follower growth rate, and review velocity all feed the algorithm
- Active author profile. Authors who regularly update their profiles and publish new content get algorithmic preference over dormant profiles
The recommendation system is the long-term play. Featured Deals and ads drive immediate spikes. Algorithmic recommendations drive a steady baseline of discovery that compounds as your follower count and engagement metrics grow.
BookBub for Nonfiction
Most BookBub advice is written for fiction authors, but the platform works for nonfiction with some adjustments:
Nonfiction categories are less competitive. Featured Deal acceptance rates for nonfiction tend to be higher because fewer nonfiction authors submit. The audience is smaller than romance or thriller, but the buyers are more intentional. Someone looking for a personal finance book on BookBub is actively seeking education, not just entertainment.
Nonfiction readers buy catalogs. When a fiction reader finds a new author through BookBub, they might read one or two more books. When a nonfiction reader finds an author whose expertise solves a real problem, they tend to buy the entire catalog. Our data shows that BookBub-acquired nonfiction readers purchase an average of 2.3 titles from our catalog, compared to 1.4 titles from Amazon organic discovery.
Price sensitivity is lower. Nonfiction readers are less price-sensitive than fiction readers. A Featured Deal at $2.99 for a nonfiction title performs nearly as well as a $0.99 deal because the buyer is purchasing expertise, not entertainment hours.
Implementation Checklist
- Create your free author profile at bookbub.com/partners
- Upload a professional photo and write a concise bio
- Verify all book listings and purchase links
- Add your BookBub follow link to your website, email signature, and social profiles
- Add a BookBub follow CTA to the back matter of every book
- Submit your strongest title for a Featured Deal
- Set up a BookBub Ads campaign targeting readers of comparable authors
- Submit for Featured Deals monthly until accepted
Total cost for the free profile and organic strategy: $0. Total cost for a Featured Deal or ad campaign: $50-$500 depending on your strategy. The return on either investment, measured in reader acquisition and catalog sales, consistently outperforms every other author marketing channel I have tested.
For the complete book marketing framework. Including BookBub, Amazon optimization, and 30+ additional channels. See The $20 Dollar Agency. For building the multi-book catalog that makes BookBub's cross-selling features so powerful, start with The $100 Network. Buy The $100 Network on Amazon.
