Accept or Reject?

The Heir is on sale at the moment on Kindle for only .99c. I think I might have mentioned that a couple of times …

This means I’ve spent most of this month looking for places to advertise it so people can take advantage of this offer. There are heaps of sites out there that are interested in telling their people about your free or cheap ebooks. I’ve had fun sorting through a lot of them and I’m trying to keep track of who is advertising The Heir when so I can see if having my book appear on their site makes any difference to sales. I seem to have had a few sales from some free sites, which is good. I’ve also decided to pay some sites to advertise The Heir to see if paying the extra money has dividends. It will be interesting to see if I earn any of it back.

During my stroll through all these ‘advertise your ebook’ places, I stumbled upon the King of ebook advertising sites, BookBub. BookBub is legendary, I discovered, amongst authors. If you advertise with them, you are pretty much guaranteed a good ranking for your book during the time the ad is run. However, they have two points against them. Firstly, they are notoriously expensive, and I’m talking take-out-a-loan expensive in some categories. Secondly, they reject about 80% of books submitted.

I ummed and ahhed about whether or not I would spend the money. Fortunately, the YA category was one of the cheaper ones. Still, it was a lot of money. Then I realised how unlikely it was that someone like me would be accepted anyway. I’ve had three books released, it’s true, but I don’t have a lot of Amazon reviews. That’s usually the first place a site like this checks.

Still, I thought it was worth a try, so I submitted, talking up The Heir and its silver award from Literary Classics. It made no difference. A rejection came back within two days. While disappointing, I wasn’t too surprised. But I wondered what made them reject it? They have a list of things on their website, such as professional cover design (I’ve got that), professionally edited (I’ve got that. I’m also traditionally published, not self-published.). They talk about Amazon but don’t give a particular rating or number of reviews you have to have before they accept you, as some sites do. So what did I do wrong? Is The Heir‘s cover just not good enough for them? Am I still too unknown? I wish I knew but I don’t think they’re going to tell me. That’s one of the biggest complaints about BookBub from other authors. They aren’t all that communicative, especially when it comes to things like this.

Realistically, being refused by them should not be taken as a judgement on the worth of The Heir, although it’s hard not to take it that way. The trouble is, I may want to try BookBub in the future and I’m not going to get far if I don’t know what they want. Do you have familiarity with BookBub? What do you think makes them include a book? What makes you decide whether or not a book is worth your time? Let me know in the comments.