Readers want to read the books that other readers are already reading. It’s more fun to read the same book your friends are reading, and it’s safer. This is not an insult to readers; it’s just how humans operate. If you walk past an empty restaurant next to a packed one, most people will pick the packed restaurant even if the empty one claims to have better food, because we don’t believe marketing claims nearly as much as we believe the behavior of our fellow human beings.
The same is true with books, which leads us to a conundrum. What do you do if your book isn’t getting any readers, or if it used to get readers and it’s not anymore? How do you save a dead book from being the kind of book no one wants to read because no one is reading it?
One option is a technique called promo stacking, from Bryan Canter. He is an independent publishing consultant who’s guided many authors through launches and relaunches. He’s an Amazon ad specialist and a friend of the show, Bryan Canter.
What exactly is a promo stack?
Bryan: Polly Letofsky, who founded My Word Publishing about 15 years ago, would claim she invented the idea. We brand it as the Amazon Power Boost.
You simply set the ebook to free for some period of time, then pay money to email marketing services to blast out emails to their subscriber bases, letting people know the book is free.
Thomas: I did an episode about this a while back, but I think my episode predates the phrase “promo stack.” Back then, I called it free pulsing, a term that’s completely gone out of practice. Some of you are thinking, “But those techniques don’t work anymore because of changes to the Amazon algorithm.” It’s true that if your goal is to juice the algorithm, it won’t work as well as it used to. But it still impacts human behavior.
People want to read what other people are already reading. If you can get a bunch of people reading and talking about your book, that buzz may save it. It may be what’s needed to breathe new life into a book that had never been alive.
Bryan: That’s one reason Polly called it Power Boost when she started running these years ago. It can be a boost at any point in time. I love doing this about a month to six weeks after a book launches, and it’s very powerful then, too. I’m also an Amazon ad specialist, and if you try running an auto ad on a debut novel, Amazon has no clue which readers will like that book and no sales volume to go on.
It can harvest your keywords and dig through your product description, but without sales data, it’s working blind. Now, almost all brand-new authors will have friends and family buy their book first, then leave reviews and ratings. In many ways, that messes up the Amazon algorithm. If your Aunt Sally has never read a sci-fi novel in her life because she likes cozy mysteries, and she buys and rates your book, Amazon doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s not going to start showing your sci-fi novel to cozy mystery readers because Aunt Sally liked it.
But in a promo stack, most services are targeted by category, so the people downloading your book are the ones who actually want it. They’re the ones likely to read it and leave reviews. That’s the right kind of traffic.
Thomas: This is another reason I really like crowdfunding campaigns. Aunt Sally, who would have paid $5 for your ebook, would happily pay $100 or $150 for a signed, limited-edition, numbered hardback. Now you’re making more money from Aunt Sally, Aunt Sally is happier because she has a special copy to show off to her friends, and she’s no longer influencing your Amazon algorithm about who reads this kind of book. Everybody wins.
In general, I’m not a fan of playing with the price very early in a book’s release, because it can make the readers who paid full price feel bad. But I understand the rationale. Amazon has no information about who the readers of this book are, or worse, the little information it does have is bad, and the pump just isn’t working. Pouring some water into the pump to prime it makes sense. If your book only sold to friends and family for whom $5 isn’t a big deal, you’re fine.
People rarely check the price of something they’ve already purchased. Once you buy your airplane ticket, you don’t check what it costs the following week.
When should you run a promo stack?
Bryan: If your book is just starting to stagnate and not moving anymore, a promo stack is a good way to give it a boost. That boost juices the algorithm a little, but more importantly, it drives word of mouth, and there’s probably no more powerful marketing tool than that.
The other strong use case is if you’re writing a series and getting ready to release another installment. Whether it’s book two, three, or six, readers will start that series at book one. So, book one is almost always worth promoting about a month before the next installment releases.
Thomas: You should run a promo stack ahead of every sequel launch, and it should always be for book one. This is why you never want the first book you write to be the first book in a series. That’s your weakest writing, and all of your promotion for the sequels is going to circle back to that freshman effort. It’s like running with weights on your ankles.
That first book has to work; readers have to get excited and fall in love with the characters.
Another advantage of promo stacking is that it helps solve the low-review problem. If you don’t have many reviews, that hurts your advertising and your promotion. People were interested in the book, then they saw it had 12 or 24 reviews and thought, “Is this really a good book, or are these just the author’s friends?”
The more reviews you have, the more likely readers are to believe everything else on the page.
How do you actually set your book up for a promo stack?
Bryan: If your book is in Kindle Unlimited, the easiest path is to use the tools in KDP Select. In KDP Select, you get five days to run a free promotion. You can also use the Countdown feature to discount to $0.99, but my recommendation is to offer it for free.
If you’re not in KDP Select, you’ll have to play a price-matching game. You’ll go to another platform, set the book to free there, then contact Amazon and ask them to price-match it to free.
Thomas: Let’s assume we’re in KDP Select. We’ve lowered our price to free, but if I just do that, nobody will care. There’s an unlimited number of free books on the internet.
How do I get my free book in front of readers who will be excited about it?
Bryan: This is the secret sauce. There are hundreds of email service providers with subscriber bases that will advertise your book for you.
I like to schedule these things about three weeks in advance, because I not only want to book the exact services I want, I also want to schedule them in a specific order.
Early on, people would stack five, six, seven, eight of these services on a single day and just hammer it hard, getting 3,000 to 4,000 downloads in a day and then nothing the next. Amazon doesn’t like that. What they want to see is sustained momentum over a period of days, ideally building.
I’ll schedule the solid-but-not-best services early, then layer up to where my best one lands on day four.
Thomas: If you have a BookBub Featured Deal, which is by far the best of these email promotions, you’d schedule around that and make the BookBub date the final day.
Amazon sees that as a book that’s getting more popular each day, and then on day four, 10,000 BookBub readers all download at once. That signals velocity to the algorithm. My episode on how the algorithm works can help you really understand it.
You’re describing spreading the promotion out, which makes it more flexible. Some of these promo sites will say, “We can do Tuesday but not Wednesday.” If you’re not trying to stack everything on one day, you can accommodate that and schedule more promos over more sites.
This is one thing that has changed since I last covered this topic in 2017. Back then, landing everything on the same day was best practice. That’s no longer the case. Spreading it out gives you more bang for your buck.
People constantly ask which sites to use. The only one I’d say that is good for everyone, all the time, is BookBub. They’re so big that if you can get a BookBub Featured Deal, you’re almost never going to lose, unless your cover is failing to make the right promise to the right audience, but BookBub usually filters those books out before approval anyway.
Which promo sites consistently deliver the best results?
Bryan: Keep applying for BookBub Featured Deals, and treat it as its own category. If you get one, you can schedule the other services around it. But you can’t control whether you get a BookBub, so let’s talk about what you can control.
By far the best service that consistently delivers top results across genres, including nonfiction, is Freebooksy. It’s almost always at the top of the list. I put Freebooksy on day four. Part of the reason is that not everyone reads their email every day, so people who see the notification late still have day five to grab the book.
Fussy Librarian is a solid number two you can almost always use.
Kindle Nation Daily and Book Gorilla deliver pretty consistently. They won’t get you the same numbers that Freebooksy does, but they produce reliably, especially if you can get their combined promotion. If you sign up for their list, they send out 50% off coupons regularly. Doing the Kindle Nation Daily sponsorship and the Book Gorilla slide-over together gives you two for the price of one.
For fantasy, there’s one called Book Barbarian. It’s mostly fantasy and some sci-fi, and it’s great. Sometimes it performs as well as Freebooksy, but it won’t do anything for a cozy mystery or a romance title. For faith-based fiction, I discovered Faithful Reads, which is a subset of eReader Cafe. It does fantastic for that category. Robin Reads has strong subcategories for romance.
Thomas: What kind of results have you gotten with eReader News Today?
Bryan: I haven’t used it in quite a while. It wasn’t performing well for me, so I dropped it from my rotation.
Booksends can be good, and I usually pair it with eReader IQ and Book Runes. You schedule one, and the others can be add-ons.
Thomas: One approach is to buy them all and measure as best you can, which can be tricky if they’re all running on the same day. You can’t always tell which downloads came from eReader News Today vs. Hello Books, Robin Reads, BookRaid, or Book Doggy.
What often happens as a new site emerges, is that they spend heavily on email acquisition, and they’re great for a while, but if they stop spending to find new readers, their list gets stale over time.
I wonder if that’s what happened with eReader News Today. They used to be the go-to number two after BookBub back in 2017. BookBub has always held number one, but eReader News Today may also just perform better in certain genres than others.
How do you know which services to trust with your book?
Bryan: They’re all going to work at least a little. David Gaughran has been on the show recently, and he publishes an updated list of the best-performing services on his website. That’s a great starting point.
Services that continue to do well are the ones that actively curate their lists, cutting dead weight, and keeping their subscriber base engaged. The ones that are fading aren’t as diligent about maintenance.
Thomas: If you recommend poor books too often, your subscribers lose confidence in you.
BookBub is always the best because they’ve stayed picky. They’re less likely to recommend a terrible book or AI-generated slop because you’re competing with so many other titles. Plus, they have human curation reviewing submissions.
Freebooksy and Fussy Librarian don’t quality-control the books themselves, but they do a lot of quality control on their lists, and they sell out early. That’s another reason to schedule three weeks out.
Bryan: Several sites won’t approve a book unless it has a minimum of four or five decent reviews. They’ll look at the cover, pop open the “look inside,” and get back to you within a day or two. They want to protect their list from bad books, so they check you out before approving you.
What does it actually cost to run a promo stack?
Thomas: It seems counterintuitive to spend money telling people about a book you’re giving away for free.
Bryan: BookBub is its own category. Depending on the genre, a BookBub feature deal runs anywhere from $300 to $1,000, but it’s worth it. It will probably pay for itself.
When I’m running a stack without BookBub, I budget about $500 for roughly 10 services.
- Freebooksy knows its value, and many genres run between $75 and $100.
- Fussy Librarian is around $60.
- Book Bassett runs for $9, and it always adds more value than it costs. I keep it on every list.
Thomas: So if you’re really short on cash, $9 for Book Bassett with a KDP Unlimited title is a low-risk entry point. You get a few extra reviews and start clawing your way toward momentum.
Back when I did this a lot under the name free pulsing, it was shockingly effective when the writing was good. It was so effective that for some books, we eventually went perma-free, offering the first book in a series for free on a permanent basis because readers fell in love with it.
It might sound counterintuitive if you’re thinking, “I’m spending money to give something away for free,” but it’s not counterintuitive once you understand that people want to read what other people are already reading.
There’s also an algorithm benefit that’s easy to overlook. People on Freebooksy or BookBub read a lot of books, which means that if they enjoy your book, they’re useful metadata for Amazon. Their reading history gives Amazon a rich graph of what other books yours resembles.
Your Aunt Diane, who reads one book a year, is not only unlikely to read something similar to your book, but Amazon also has very limited data on her preferences. Nine purchases over ten years, none of them similar to each other, don’t give the algorithm much to work with.
But someone who reads a book a day, and plenty of people do, is exactly the kind of reader who gravitates to freebook sites because reading that voraciously gets expensive. Amazon has deep data on what else that person enjoys.
Bryan: Amazon knows which readers are like that person. If Bill got the book, reviewed it, and loved it, Amazon can identify thousands of readers similar to Bill and start serving them your book, both through organic search and Amazon Ads. Those heavy readers are the ones more likely to take a chance on an unknown author. The reader who reads one book a month can just stick to the top bestsellers. The voracious reader has already consumed the bestsellers and is ready to discover something less known.
Thomas: When readers are waiting for the next Brandon Sanderson book, or the next Stephen King, they’re open to trying a new author.
What other sites are adjacent to promo stacking sites?
Goodreads
Thomas: Goodreads is adjacent to the promo stack strategy but works differently. It doesn’t email a subscriber list. It places you on the Goodreads website. I’ve found that giving away 100 ebooks on Goodreads on day one is very useful. Currently, those free Goodreads downloads count as sales for the Amazon algorithm. I’ve seen authors hit number one new release just from a Goodreads ebook giveaway.
Never give away physical books on Goodreads. There’s a cottage industry of Amazon resellers with thousands of sock puppet accounts who scoop up all the paper books and resell them. Then you’ll see that same book cannibalizing your sales at a lower price with no reviews attached. Ebooks only on Goodreads.
Bryan: I always do a Goodreads giveaway for myself and for clients I’m advising on marketing, and the second-order effects are significant. With The Fourth Magi, we ran a Goodreads giveaway on day three after launch. It hit number one new release and number one in two categories, and I’m pretty sure the Goodreads downloads were counting as actual sales.
If you run the giveaway sweepstakes for three to four weeks beforehand, you might get 1,000 to 3,000 people entering to win 100 copies. When someone enters the giveaway, Goodreads notifies everyone who follows them, and the book is added to the entrant’s want-to-read list. Even if they don’t win, when they finish their current book and look for what’s next, your book is right there. They may not get it free, but there’s a good chance they’ll buy it or pick it up in KU.
Thomas: Goodreads is starting to update its platform. I have seen evidence that actual development resources are being invested into Goodreads. Amazon is investing in it. Turns out that data is really valuable to license to large language models, so cultivating the platform may be worth the investment.
AuthorsXP
Another adjacent strategy is AuthorsXP. What kind of results have you had with them?
Bryan: I love AuthorsXP for list building. They’re essentially a raffle site. A group of books gets bundled together, one copy of each is given away, and readers sign up to win.
The XP stands for cross-promotion. Authors agree to publicize the giveaway to their own email lists. I grew my list from about 20 people to around 1,000 through AuthorsXP.
You do need to curate the list afterward and remove people who were only there for the freebie. But roughly 75% of the subscribers I’ve added through AuthorsXP are still on my list, and they’re buying my new books when they release.
BookSweeps, StoryOrigin, BookFunnel
Thomas: There are other similar sites such as BookSweeps, StoryOrigin, and BookFunnel. The main approach is to experiment. You’ll get results from all of them; some will give you better results than others.
Remember that these sites generally work better for fiction. Fiction readers tend to be fans of a genre who just want more cozy romance or military sci-fi and aren’t particularly choosy about the author.
Nonfiction is harder. Good nonfiction is satisfying in a way that once you know the answer to the question you were asking, you don’t want another book on the same topic.
Do promo stacks work for nonfiction?
Bryan: With fiction (not including a BookBub Feature Deal), I typically see 4,000 to 5,000 downloads. With nonfiction, it’s usually 1,500 to 2,500. Nonfiction covers a wide range of topics, including business, finance, and memoir. Memoir is a half-step between fiction and nonfiction. It’s a story that happens to be true. So, memoir will sometimes perform closer to fiction numbers.
But the worst results we’ve ever seen from one of these promotions is around 1,500 copies downloaded. If you’re launching a brand-new book and struggling to get any traction, having 1,500 copies in the hands of readers can be a real boost.
The word-of-mouth and reviews that come back in will build over time. The rule of thumb for organic Amazon reviews is that about one in 100 purchasers will leave a written review. That means you need to move 400 to 500 books just to get five reviews from people you haven’t personally emailed.
Putting 1,500 to 2,500 copies out there changes that math entirely.
Those readers aren’t going to read your book tomorrow. They’re going to finish whatever they’re currently reading and then decide what’s next. The reviews will come in steadily over time.
How do these promotions pay for themselves?
Bryan: First, Amazon defaults. If you’re in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s product page defaults to “check it out in KU” even though the book is free. People could own it forever for free, but they follow the default and check it out in KU instead, which means they’re paying you page reads.
Thomas: The devil is in the defaults. Almost everyone follows the default action even when a different option is clearly better for them in every way. They’re busy, they’re stressed, and they just click through without reading every option on the screen.
Bryan: The other way they pay for themselves is through traffic to your Amazon product page. When readers land on the page, some of them notice the audiobook and decide to spend an Audible credit on it instead of taking the free ebook.
During the promo for The Fourth Magi, I ended up selling roughly 50 more audiobooks than my normal baseline on the day of the promotion. That’s another way these campaigns recover their cost.
Should this be my first marketing experiment?
Thomas: This is a tactic I think every novelist needs to experiment with. Everyone should try promo stacking. It just makes a lot of sense to give away the ebook, because readers who genuinely love it will often buy the paperback anyway. If they really enjoy your book, they’ll want a physical copy to show off to their friends.
Nonfiction readers who get the ebook are actually more likely to buy the paper too, because they want to underline and highlight it. People want to interact with nonfiction. In some nonfiction genres, promo stacking still works well.
When I started my first business, I was buying every business book anyone recommended. A business consultant costs $500 an hour; an Audible credit gets you 10 hours of their advice for $20. I once walked through the business section of Barnes and Noble with my mom and recognized almost every book on the top shelf.
The nonfiction categories where this works best are the ones where the questions never end, such as business, personal finance, health, and professional skills. Once you’ve read one business book, there are always more questions to answer. That’s different from a book on pregnancy, where once you’ve read the book, you’re largely satisfied with what you learned.
What’s your advice for the author who hasn’t yet tried promo stacking?
Bryan: I don’t see how you can lose. It’s going to cost you some money. It’s probably not going to cost you readers, because almost everyone who downloads your free book would never have known about it otherwise. If they get it, love it, and tell someone else, you’ve sold a copy you never would have sold.
My encouragement is not to dip your toe in. If you’re going to do it and you can afford $200 to $300, go ahead and stack six or seven services and find out which ones work for your genre.
Remember that Blue Ink and Kirkus Reviews charge $300 to $500 for a single paid review that might not even be favorable. A promo stack can run for the same money and produce actual user reviews and star ratings directly on your Amazon product page, which is exactly what readers see when they land on it.
Promo stacking is my number-one startup marketing tactic for every book. It’s not the only tactic, and it won’t carry you for months, but it’s the best way to give a book a boost at launch, when momentum is stalling, or ahead of the next book in your series.
Thomas: While you wouldn’t want to run a promo every month, and KDP will limit you anyway, it’s something you can do once a year.
I interviewed Chautona Havig, who had written over 52 books. She ran a version of promos where she put a different book on sale every week and rotated through her back list all year long.
It was a price pulse rather than a free pulse. She wasn’t always going all the way to free, but she was cycling through her catalog and putting each title in front of a new audience.
You can do the same thing (even if you don’t have 52 books) by taking that old book that isn’t getting attention and finding it a new audience. It could transform your career, and it’s definitely worth trying.
Connect with Bryan Canter
Links for Services
The Best
The Core Stack
Genre Specialists
- Book Barbarian (sci-fi/fantasy)
- Faithful Reads (Christian fiction)
- Robin Reads (strong in romance)
Budget Tier
List-Builders / Cross-Promotion
Also Mentioned
Related Episodes
