Book promotion sites can still be useful, but you have to be a little careful with them.

Some are great. Some are fine for certain genres. Some used to be good and now feel like someone left the lights on after the business moved out. And a few will happily take your money even if their list, audience, or traffic probably isn’t going to do much for your book.

That’s the annoying part about this kind of promotion. In theory, it’s simple. You discount your book, submit it to sites with readers in your genre, and those sites share the deal through their email lists, websites, or social channels. If the audience is good and the timing works, you can get downloads, sales, page reads, reviews, better visibility, and sometimes enough momentum to make the promo worth far more than what you paid.

But the quality varies a lot. BookBub is the obvious big name, but it’s also hard to get accepted. Plenty of smaller book promotion sites can still help, especially when you stack them around a free or discounted promotion, but you don’t want to waste hours submitting to sites that no longer operate, don’t cover your genre, or haven’t sent meaningful reader traffic since sometime around the last season of Lost.

So I put this list together to help you sort through the options more quickly.

Below, you’ll find free and paid book promotion sites, along with notes on pricing, genre restrictions, erotica policies, requirements, and anything else worth knowing before you submit. I’ve also included some strategy notes on how these promo sites work, how to stack them without wasting your budget, and how to track whether a service is actually worth using again.

Make sure to check the notes to the right and ensure your ebook meets the requirements. Many of these I have used, while others were ones I collected based on recommendations from by other authors. So please keep that in mind, and, if you find one to be incredible or terrible, let me know and I'll update as necessary.

Quick note: Book promotion sites change pricing, requirements, genre policies, and even ownership fairly often. I’ve updated this list with the most current information I could verify, but always check the site’s submission page before booking a promotion, especially if your book includes adult content, has limited reviews, or is outside the site’s core genres.

Check this post out if you're looking for book promotion sites for audiobooks.

These services either offer to send your book to other promo sites (saving you time and energy) or will offer your book to a premium group of readers. In most cases, you'll get a better quality output through these sites…but at a price.

Also, keep in mind the list of paid sites below includes some that I haven't personally used, and some that I have. I've worked to compile as legitimate of a list of book promotion sites as possible to make it easier for you to see what is out there. If you come across any you love or hate, let me know and I'll keep the list up-to-date.

If you know of a legitimate site that should be featured here, contact me and let me know!

My Top Recommendations

When it comes to the services that I use the most, I divide these paid promotion sites into two categories: sites that will promote a free book, and those that will promote a discounted book.

Promoting a Free Book

Note that these are not free services. Instead they are paid services that will promote a free book. This can be useful if the free book you are promoting is the first in a long series. My top recommendations are:

• Freebooksy 
• ENT 
• RobinReads 
• Fussy Librarian 
• BKNights 
• EReaderIQ 
• BookBassett 
• ManyBooks 
• BookRaid 
• Goodkindles

Promoting a Discounted Book

For those promoting at a discount (around 33% or more of the original price), these are generally the best:

• BookBub (note that it is hard to get a BookBub deal, but you can apply every 90 days, and you should)
• RobinReads 
• ENT 
• BargainBooksy 
• Fussy Librarian 
• EreaderIQ 
• Red Feather Romance (Romance only)
• Goodkindles

All you have to do is submit your book information for a promotion, and they'll blast it out to their – hopefully – avid readers. With all of those free downloads, the hope is that some of them will leave a review and the spike in downloads will help with your Amazon rankings.

So, why do they do such an amazing free service?

Podcast Episode – Learn More About Which Promotion Sites Are Best And How They Work

In many cases, these free and paid book promo sites will use their Amazon Associate link to point to your book. That way, if someone clicks on it and downloads it, the site will get a percentage of anything the person ends up buying within 24 hours of clicking the link. Yup…that's how Amazon Associate works.

But don't let that get you all riled up! These book promotion sites are basically free advertisement for you. By getting the clicks and downloads, your book will become more popular by the minute…and all you had to do was fill out a form. It's a win-win situation.

Some even do it to see how well your book performs with their readers and will then turn around and offer you a very profitable publishing deal like Inkitt does — which is kind of brilliant if you think about it.

STRATEGY #1: Sell More Books with Promo Stacking

My #1 strategy is to stack your promotions so you are running several within a few days of each other. This triggers Amazon's Popularity Effect, which can last for a long time and give you added benefit to running those promotions.

Warning: Do not stack your book promotions all on the same day. If you do this, you will show a sales spike, which does not trigger Amazon's algorithm to continue promoting the book. You will see a sales spike, then it will slump right back down to where it was before.

Instead, you choose to space your promotions our by 1-3 days if you are being aggressive, or around one per week for a more steady, drawn-out campaign.

Pro Tip: To maximize the benefits of these book promotions even further, try running a small amount of Amazon Ads while the promotions are running. In my experience, Amazon gets better at targeting those ads to the right people when you are simultaneously running book promotions to your discounted book.

STRATEGY #2: Test Your Book Promotion Services

Not all of these services work well, or at least they might not work well for your genre or even your specific book. That is why, for every book series, I recommend you test all the book promotion sites that you use.

While it's impossible to know exactly how many sales are directly attributable to your promotion, but it's okay to look at just the sales data overall. After all, if the promotions trigger the Amazon algorithm so that you get even more sales, even if those sales didn't come directly from the promotion, I would say they still count. Here is what you should track:

1. How much you spent on the promotion
2. How many units you sold in the week following (another important reason to space out your promotions)
3. How much money your entire series made in the week following (make sure to look at the entire series, especially if your first book is free and therefore won't make any money back on its own)
4. Calculate your ROI
   1. Formula: HOW MUCH YOU EARNED / HOW MUCH YOU SPENT x 100% = ROI
   2. Example: $100 / $50 x 100% = 200% ROI
5. Repeat for other book promotions
6. Identify the promotions that showed the highest ROI

Using this strategy will easily help you identify the services that are worth your time and money, and those that aren't.

But, if you're a fan of outsourcing, another option is to go to Fiverr and pay someone to go through the lists above or follow their own list – although I don’t think they will be as thorough as my list. Typically, I will send my Virtual Assistant this list and have them do it for me, but until you make the VA leap, see if you can find someone on Fiverr to do it for you.

Fiverr and other freelance marketplaces can still be useful if you want someone else to submit your book to promo sites for you, but I’d be careful about relying on old gig recommendations.

These gigs change constantly. Sellers disappear, packages get renamed, review counts shift, and some services stop promoting books the same way they used to.

If you hire someone for this, ask for a current list of the sites they submit to, check whether those sites still accept your genre, and make sure they’re not simply blasting your book to irrelevant pages or low-quality groups. The time savings can be useful, but only if the person is submitting to legitimate promo sites that still have real readers.

Disclaimer: Writing a post about this is pretty hard because every day these sites are are changing, going out of business, or just disappearing. I cannot promise that the information above will be the same when you click on the link. However, in an ever quest to publish amazing content, please, by all means, contact me and let me know if any information has changed. I will be sure to update the site to reflect this. Till then, stay frosty and enjoy!

Alrighty guys, well I hope you enjoyed this list. Now go out and make the most of it, and be sure to download my list of personal favorite book promotion sites.

After you grab my personal favorite book promo sites, check out the other fan-favorite posts:

• Read my full Atticus Review to see what the hype is all about
• Find out what software you need (and what you don't) in my Best Book Writing Software article
• Check out my ultimate guide to Book Cover Design to create a cover that helps you sell more books
• Discover a fast and inexpensive way to Create a 3D Mockup of your book