Yes, yours truly has finally secured a BookBub Featured Deal for Presents for Raymond, a collection of six short horror stories themed to Christmas.

I’ve got a Free International Deal (USA, UK, Canada and Australia) and the newsletter that Presents for Raymond will be listed in will go out on Saturday 20 December. As such, Presents for Raymond is currently free to download and will be until the end of the 23rd. Go ahead and download your copy now if you haven’t already done so.

What Is BookBub?

In case you haven’t heard of BookBub, it’s the largest and most effective e-book promotional service. It has massive mailing lists in various categories and is known for generating profits and giving authors a lot of exposure.

Spaces on newsletters are limited. Because the demand is so great, BookBub is very selective about what e-books they’ll list in their newsletters. The website says that if you submit an e-book for consideration, there’s only a 10-20% chance it will be accepted.

When submitting an e-book for consideration, you agree to either reduce its price or make it free. You can submit an e-book for each type of giveaway (reduced price or free) once per month.

If an e-book gets selected for either type of giveaway, you can’t submit it again for another six months. You can, however, continue submitting other e-books.

Persistence Pays Off

To show you how selective BookBub, I’ve submitted Presents for Raymond no fewer than 31 times since September 2023 (roughly half of these submissions were reduced price; the others free).

Finally, on my 32nd submission, BookBob accepted Presents for Raymond. As I said previously, it’s a free deal I’ve got. I would have preferred a reduced price one (the e-book would have gone from $3.99 to $0.99) but beggars can’t be choosers.

Potential Results

According to BookBub’s pricing guide. I can expect around 11,600 downloads. If I get this number, I’ll be elated.

What’s worth pointing out is that BookBub is known for giving e-book downloads a healthy tail. Usually when you give an e-book away for free, a newsletter spot will cause a spike in downloads on the day the newsletter goes out. You might get a small number the following day, but the drop from promotion day to the next day is dramatic.

With BookBub, people say there’s no great drop in download numbers after promotion day. Instead, it’s more like a gradual decline. People still get the bulk of the downloads on promotion day, but the figures for the next few days are not to be overlooked.

I’ve told BookBub that Presents for Raymond will be free until the end of 23 December. With three extra days after the newsletter goes out, hopefully I’ll get plenty of extra downloads.

Tempering My Expectations

With that being the case, I’m keeping my expectations low. My goal is to hit 11,600 downloads. Presents for Raymond is available on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google Play and Kobo, so hopefully this wide availability will help it reach the 11,600 figure (along with the three days of it being free after the newsletter goes out).

What about paid downloads? Sometimes when I’ve promoted a free e-book, people have bought the other instalments in the series despite not having read the first one. There’s a chance that Dog Flight, a collection of seven short horror stories that’s in the same series as Presents for Raymond, will get a small number of paid downloads on the day and in the few days afterwards.

Three of the stories in Presents for Raymond are inspired by two-sentence horror stories in my Terror in Brief e-books. Some people might decide to download one or even all of these.

Plus, there’s a chance that when Presents for Raymond reverts to full price on 24 December, it might get a few paid downloads in following the days or weeks thanks to boosted exposure on Amazon and other platforms.

Realistically, given the potentially large number of free downloads, I think it’s sensible to expect some paid downloads if not on the day, then in the days and weeks to come.

I’m not going to give my hopes up. I can’t rely on paid downloads when I’m promoting a free e-book, so any sales that do come in, I’m going to treat as bonuses.

I don’t like giving away e-books for free, but I’m cautiously optimistic that this BookBub promotion will be worthwhile.

The Actual Results

Once a month has passed, I’m going to write a blog post that looks at the results of my free BookBub Featured Deal in detail. I’ll share how many downloads I got across the various platforms Presents for Raymond is available on and I’ll let you know my thoughts on how things went.

It’s taken me ages to get a BookBub Featured Deal. Hopefully this free one is the first of many!

Remember to download Presents for Raymond and remember that presents aren’t the only thing that can be ripped apart at Christmas.