If you haven’t heard of BookBub as a promotional tool for selling books, well, I guess you’ve been hiding under a rock. At the moment, BookBub is the big name for advertising, because it works, even if it does have a significant cost. Even big name self-publishers are talking about it and recommending it for getting your name out there.

Sounds like a great opportunity for self-publishers, right?

Well, I’m not so sure. I wrote last month about my latest free promotion, and how I had downloads in the thousands, numbers to be happy with. I was hoping, from the way my numbers were climbing, to have my book on the first page of Amazon’s free list. But once I hit about #50, I didn’t seem to climb much faster. I went up, slid down, went up, slid down. In the final push, I couldn’t make it past #31.

Curious why, I had a look at the books above me, and while some of them were obvious big name books, many weren’t that different to mine, leaving me wondering what was different. A quick search soon confirmed my hypothesis – nearly every book on the list above me was listed on the BookBub site.

Is it possible to get into that top 20 list without a paid promotion? I don’t know, perhaps some weeks are better than others, and some books do better than others, but overall, it seems unlikely.

This is either the best possible news for indies, or the worst. It seems that though Amazon doesn’t sell those highest places, that they can be bought. Most people who have talked about a BookBub promotion have said they paid for themselves in sales afterwards, meaning the advertising costs (which are in the hundreds of dollars zone) are worth it, but you still need to have that money up front, which many indies don’t. And as always, there’s still a risk that you won’t make your money back.

What do you think? Are promotional sites like BookBub a benefit for book sales, or not? Would you consider buying an ad?