BookFunnel Promotion Results

A year ago, I decided to try regular promotions of my books through BookFunnel. For those who are unfamiliar with the site, it’s a selling and promotional tool for books in various formats. The site helps you to grow your mailing list, sending out ARCs, and other things. You can be either exclusive to Amazon or you can use multiple platforms. It’s up to you.

I don’t use this service for everything yet, but I do use it to build my mailing list by joining group promos to find potential readers. I also use it to offer my books at discounted prices through the group promos. These ongoing events are available in all kinds of categories. There are requirements and restrictions, but I found that after my first event, I easily met each promoter’s requirements. Once you familiarize yourself with BookFunnel, it’s reasonably easy to navigate and set yourself up with ‘Landing’ pages. I understand that there’s a free option but on the advice of others I opted in to pay the $150 annual fee and sync my newsletter provider with BookFunnel.

While setting up my pages, I decided to offer my first Casey Holland mystery, The Opposite of Dark for free and did so for seven months in 2022. I scheduled sales events at about the same rate, and consistently discounted my books for $.99, but you can choose other price points, depending on the promoter’s guidelines. I chose this low price to generate sales of other books in my series at the regular price, which worked to some extent.

The final tally for 2022 is 698 free downloads of The Opposite of Dark, by working with at least five different promoters over the year. What I’ve found, though, is that a percentage of new subscribers stayed only long enough to get the free book then unsubscribe. More left over the following weeks and months, but others joined, so it’s been a constantly fluid situation. Still, I have more subscribers than I started with in 2022.

I sold 72 ebooks through BookFunnel last year, but I’d say that only about 30% of them were purchased at the regular price of $3.99. Now that I have a baseline to work with, I can look for ways to improve my stats in 2023. With my pending move this could be a hit-and-miss endeavor, but if I don’t let readers know about my books, they’re not going to sell. I’ll post the new promos next week. I’m also pondering whether I should raise my ebook price by $1.00 to $4.99 each, although this might not be a smart idea. Any thoughts? And if you want to learn more about BookFunnel, I’ve suppled the link HERE.

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Author: debrapurdykong

I'm a British Columbia author who's been writing for over 30 years. My volunteer experiences, criminology diploma, and security work inspired me to write the Casey Holland transit security novels set in Metro Vancouver. I'm also a part-time facilitator in Creative Writing Workshops through Port Moody's Recreation program. Feel free to contact me at dpurdykong@gmail.com

11 thoughts on “BookFunnel Promotion Results”

  2. Thanks for diagnosing your stats and sharing the results here, Deb. I think joining platforms like BookFunnel and doing a lot of promotions is only worthwhile for authors with multiple books, like you.

    Based on your results, you didn’t get the money back yet from your initial BookFunnel investment. It is my belief when talking to other authors, that most often only break even based on the freebies and paid promos. That’s why I have stayed clear of them. Over the long run, this approach might be beneficial.

    Another adage is that you have to spend money to make one. Maybe one day I’ll revert to that. 🙂

    Regarding your asking price for the novels, it might be a good idea to raise them to $4.99. Maybe have a look at what peers charge for similar genre and volume (pages) of books.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Thanks, Liesbet, You’re right, I don’t make my investment in BookFunnel back, but I make up for it through other sales streams, so at the end of the day, my promotion efforts are in the black. I usually have to spend money upfront in fees in order to take part in promotion sales events and craft fairs.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Bookfunnel is toward the top of my TODO list so I appreciate your reflections on this. Sounds like you might have made some money but felt you increased your exposure? That might be good enough.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. You’re very welcome, Jacqui. BF has definitely increased my exposure, but by itself I’m not profiting off of it yet. The thing about marketing mystery fiction, and perhaps other fiction genres, is that I do some events more for exposure than money, and to connect with other authors who are better at marketing than I am. Other events are more profit driven, like Christmas craft fairs. It’s about experimenting with that combination to see what’s working for me on any given year.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. Though I haven’t participated in BookFunnel’s promotions in a while, I use them extensively for distributing to Beta readers, for ARCs, for my Christmas freebie, etc. It’s been a very useful tool.

    Liked by 1 person

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