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The Best Book Promotion Sites in 2024

Updated by David Gaughran 3 May 2024. Marketing • 210 Comments.

These are the very best book promotion services in 2024 for boosting your sales, launches, free promotions, series deals, and mailing list sign-ups. Something for all budgets and experience levels with self-publishing – including a few options which are completely free!

This list of book promo sites is curated by me personally. All sites below have been vetted and tested in a range of genres, and are here because of results.

You can skip to the section you are looking for below but make sure to check the end for a free course on how to build a marketing campaign. Yes, that’s right, a completely free course on how to promote a book. Read on, pilgrim!

Promo Sites Explained

There’s a whole section at the end on how to use what you might call promo sites, deal sites, ad sites, or readers sites, depending – you would think a community of writers might have nailed down the nomenclature around book promotions after ten years, but there you go.

Promo sites are basically like Groupon for ebooks: authors pay a fee to have their book listed in the daily offers – usually sent out by email – and they get lots of sales or downloads in return. Readers get freebies and discounts, and the author’s book jumps into the charts; everyone wins.

There’s a lot more to using these sites effectively in terms of strategy, and see the Build A Marketing Campaign section at the end for free resources to help you there, but those are the basics of book promotion for self-published authors. We focus a lot on price promotions – i.e. running discounts on books to get sales moving.

Boost Sales With Promo Stacking

The very best way to use promo sites is to “stack” your promos, as experienced self-publishers say – which just means running several at once. However, don’t make the mistake of running them all on the same day.

The best way to stack promos is one after the other. Here’s a short video explaining the technique:

BookBub

The Big Daddy of book promo sites deserves a category of its own as it is a different beast. A much larger beast.

BookBub arrived on the scene several years ago and utterly transformed book promotion. It now has way more juice than everything else here combined. Which is no surprise when you discover they have over ten million voracious readers subscribed to its lists.

Sign up as reader to the BookBub Featured Deals email and select your favorite genres from 42 categories. You will get daily emails with a range of books. Household names, undiscovered gems, traditionally published, small press, and self-published. A real mix of free books, 99¢ deals, and a few $1.99/$2.99 books – but even those are usually heavily discounted. Reader-me checks it daily.

BookBub Featured Deals

Getting your book into BookBub’s Featured Deals email is expensive. You can check the full price list here. What you will see is that a 99¢ Featured Deal will cost anything from $152 to $1,000+ depending on category size. Your book will go out to 2m-4m readers in the case of the more expensive categories, and you could sell thousands of books. Authors typically report making their money back in twenty-four hours, and enjoying sustained sales for a period afterwards also. Also keep in mind there are much cheaper sites below, if that up-front cost is too high a barrier.

It’s a little cheaper to get a freebie featured, and more expensive for higher-priced books. (I don’t recommend doing the latter.) My last free run generated around 40,000 downloads – to give you an idea how powerful this option can be.

The biggest stumbling block with BookBub isn’t the cost. It’s the difficulty of getting picked. You must apply, and BookBub says it only accepts 20% of applicants. (I’m guessing Dan Brown has a slightly better chance than most, so you and me probably face tighter odds.) If you are exclusive to Amazon, or don’t have very many reviews on your book, or your presentation isn’t excellent, your chances of getting picked are very slim indeed. To apply, your first step is to sign up for BookBub Partners account – which I recommend doing anyway, and populating your books on the platform so readers can discover them.

BookBub Ads

There is another way to reach this passionate audience of 10m readers – one which I’ve written a guide to called BookBub Ads Expert. A warning: the BookBub Ads platform is not for beginners; I recommend perusing the cheaper options below instead unless you are experienced.

Free Book Promotions

Free book promotions refer to promoting a book which is free, rather than promotions which cost nothing (but those exist too – see below). These free promos are often the easiest and cheapest to put together, giving the best return in terms of simply getting your books into readers’ hands. Here are my favourite sites, in order of preference. In 2024, free promotions generally get the best return.

Note: Freebooksy and some others provide a “promo stacks” service where they will automatically book you into several different sites. I don’t recommend doing this. It’s far better to do it manually – see my video for a guide – not least because these stacks often include sub-par sites which I don’t recommend . The series promos are great though and are discussed in detail below.

Discounts

Some sites which are fab with freebies are not so good with discounted books so I have a different set of recommendations here. Most only accept 99¢ deals but that’s almost always the best way to run a discount anyway. These promos aren’t as powerful as they used to be – alas – but I still see great value in them when used strategically (see the video above ). Again, these are in rough order of preference.

Also check the genre-specific deal sites below for further options.

Genre Specialists

These sites are recommended for both freebies and discounts, as long as your book is the right genre, of course.

Your genre isn’t listed? Hey, I feel you. But these sites are among the newer of those featured, so hopefully things will continue to develop in that manner. Some of the above are innovating in other useful ways, like allowing you to feature more than one book. Speaking of…

Series Promotions

Some book promo sites are finally offering options to push several books at once – ideal for a series. As always, bolded items are stronger recommendations.

  • Freebooksy ($65-$245) – the gold standard of series promotions. Results continue to be stellar from this fresh approach to series promotion which launched in beta in late 2021. Moves the needle in multiple genres: thrillers, romance, horror, SF/F, paranormal, YA, and non-fiction. Strongly recommended. More on how it works.
  • Red Feather Romance ($185) – from the same people as Freebooksy (Written Word Media).
  • EreaderIQ ($10-$25+… depending on your series length) – a regular free/discounted promo but they let you add mention of more books/formats for a nominal fee. Note: the other titles featured don’t strictly have to be in the same series.
  • BookBasset ($22) – a featured author promo where they will also let you add up to four more books of yours (included in the price), as long as they are $2.99 or less; they strongly advise at least one book is free.
  • BookDoggy ($21-$24) – this is also more of a regular free/discounted promo but where they let you add a mention of your series page. A cool add-on I wish was universal.
  • BookAdrenaline/BookBarbarian/Red Roses Romance – this family of genre specialists (detailed in the above section) let’s you add a second book to a Standard Listing for a small additional fee.

Site owners: please add more series promotion options like the above!

List Builders

A warning: list builders are best used to augment your organic list-building efforts, not to replace them. If your mailing list needs a quick injection of fresh blood, list builders can be very useful. Just remember to use this tactic sparingly.

This is not a replacement for getting subscribers organically, or a short-cut to getting a big and healthy mailing list.

If your mailing list is solely garnered from from list-builders and competitions and the like, then you might have an issue.

That said, they have their place, and I like using them strategically. This is an affiliate link, but BookSweeps is the best around – in my experience it drives much higher quality sign-ups, and the execution overall is generally much slicker, and you get to participate with much bigger authors too.

BookSweeps has recently brought in a new viral builder, which can bring thousands of emails, rather than hundreds. I’ve experimented with it and found it good value, but I’d recommend starting on the cheaper ones so that you learn the ropes. To get the best results, import the email addresses as soon as you receive them (when the promo ends), and onboard them carefully.

  • BookSweeps ($50 for the regular promo, $250 for the new viral builder)

Money Savers

Times are tight! If you have a restricted budget, and can’t just jump on everything here, these are my top value, lower cost picks from everything available – including some freebies for you too.

Fussy Librarian – regularly runs discounts if you sign up to their author newsletter.

OHFB – a nice-looking site but I don’t think the $75/$100 promos are close to being worth the cost. However, this option is free (but there’s no guarantee of being picked).

Digital Book Today – I must try the $20 free book promo here again soon as it has been a while, but this promo is free.

And then out of the sites previously mentioned, Freebooksy is the best value for freebies if you can afford (go with ENT or Fussy Librarian if you can’t). Robin Reads and ENT vie for top spot for discounts, but BookBarbarian gives them a run for their money if you write SF/F.

The Freebooksy series promo is stellar, but it’s not that cheap. EreaderIQ has far less juice, but it’s a nice option if money is very tight, or a nice augment to Freebooksy if you have money to spread around.

Keep this in mind: I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s better to let your books slide for a while and organize a really good promotion every so often, than to be promoting all the time and using lesser value sites. Use that time for writing instead – publishing something new is always the greatest promo strategy!

Create A Marketing Campaign

Booking a promotion above is a good first step when it comes to marketing, but if you want to build a real marketing campaign, if you want to come up with a killer launch plan for your next release, then you must check out my FREE course Starting From Zero.

Join 20,000 authors and learn everything about how to promote your books, from branding, packaging, and positioning, to building your list and platform, to handling a book launch or other type of promotion.

Best part? It won’t cost you a penny.

Book Promo sites are most effective when part of a marketing plan. Learn how to build your own with this Free Marketing and Self-Publishing Course - Starting From Zero with David Gaughran

Questions

Pop your questions on book promotions in the box below. I’ll get a ping right away, and answer you once I’m finished alphabetizing my collection of fine hams.

David Gaughran

David Gaughran

Born in Ireland, he now lives in a little fishing village in Portugal, although this hasn’t increased the time spent outside. He writes novels under another name, has helped thousands of authors build a readership with his books, blogs, workshops, and courses, and has created marketing campaigns for some of the biggest self-publishers on the planet. Friend to all dogs.