7 Inexpensive Book Marketing Services That Work

There are a few things that almost every author can agree upon. Which is saying quite a bit because there are hundreds of things that we disagree about. What is it? Well, it’s the fact that effective book marketing is both hard to find and quite frequently very expensive. We decided to put together a list of sites that might be worth considering and it’s our hope that at least one of them will be new to you.

Affordable Book Marketing Services

1. BookRaid. This is an email newsletter service that offers low pay per click rates to authors and puts a maximum on how much you will spend ($60). This is great because you can get really low cost per click rates (in our test of 2 books we averaged $0.11 per click). If you would like to submit a book you can go here https://bookraid.com/p/partners/sign_up. We don’t receive any revenue from them but we do have a discount code that will get you 20% off (ebookfairs20). While the cost per click is good we cannot really say that we saw a lot of book sales but at least our books got in front of lots of readers, so from that perspective it is helpful. Plus, they do provide you with more information than most of the rest of these services on how your book performed.
2. LitNuts. We have had the opportunity to talk to Mike O’Mary, one of the founders of their service and we can say he gets us. They have worked hard to build up a great list of active readers and focus on independent authors with a “best of the indies” motto. The difference with LitNuts is they don’t charge per click, instead they charge a flat fee per book ($20). Based on that, we cannot tell you how many clicks to expect but the price is low enough to be worth a try for any author. You can get more details here: https://litnuts.com/pages/authors-and-publishers
3. BargainBooksy. This is a genre-specific newsletter service. The more specific you can be with which promotion you purchase (the best genre fit for your book), you can see really great results with them. In our tests, we did see some sales directly from this campaign but not quite enough to cover the full cost of the promotion (there are lots of reasons for that, but it is true). That said, with prices ranging from $20-$90 depending on the genre, you can get a good deal through them. You can see the various genres here: https://www.bargainbooksy.com/sell-more-books/.
4. TheFussyLibrarian. This is another very large and well-known email service for your book. They also allow you to specify the genre your book best fits (they make it easy to do multiple genres). They are also less inexpensive. The cost for campaigns for our books ranged from $9.00 to $20. If you want to try something fairly safe with a high likely of returning your investment (depending on the price of your book) then this might be the best choice for you. At a minimum, may authors have heard of and tried their service, so it is battle tested to say the least. You can go here for more details: https://www.thefussylibrarian.com/newswire/for-authors/. The trick here is to try multiple genres and then run more campaigns with them when you find a category that is working well for you (don’t worry they will remind you when it is time to do it again).
5. BookBarbarian. This is a service that sends readers one email a day about a book that has been matched to the reader’s interests. Once again we tested multiple books and paid an average of $35 per promotion. You can see the details of their pricing on this page: https://bookbarbarian.com/ad-pricing/. We received very few communications from them so the visibility on your promotions with them is pretty low. To make sure you can directly tie results to this one (like many others), we recommend running only this promotion for a couple of weeks to see how effective it is for you.
6. BookDoggy. We both subscribed to this newsletter service as well as submitted books for $20 each to test it out. We can confirm that the emails indeed to go out and that they are very easy to work with for authors. Most of the emails that we see have 10 books in them so that’s not too bad, but your clicks are going to be split so keep that in mind (this is very normal for all of these services). We did not get any reporting back from them so it was pretty hard to determine the effectiveness of the campaign. The price is right though and this is another fairly well known site which allows us to give them the benefit of the doubt. Here is their author page https://bookdoggy.com/for-authors.
7. eBookFairs. Of course, we have to put ourselves on the list. That said we also are doing this for a reason. We allow you to start/stop your account as you want and let you do an unlimited number of promotions. If you pay on an annual basis, it is only $47. This gives you access to all of the fairs on the site, the ability to create fairs, and the ability to participate in our month fairs that get emailed out to thousands of readers (As of Feb 2022 we have over 12,000 subscribers to our newsletters and that number is rapidly growing). In addition, you get to see on your author page, the number of votes your book got in each fair you entered. That gives you some performance visibility and with larger fairs getting several thousand visitors, you get a lot of marketing at one of the lowest costs in the market.

There are many other great services out there that can help you market your books. We wanted to focus on those that are very cost effective with this post. That is why we didn’t include some more expensive options like OpenRoadMedia, OnlineBookClub, BookBub, and others that are either hard to get listed in or very expensive. If you have great services that you would recommend please contact us through our contact form and let us know. We would love to share that with our author community. At the end of the day anything that makes our authors more successful, makes us successful. Our job is to connect our authors to each other and to thousands of readers. However we can do that, we will.