If you follow the digital book business, you have probably heard about BookBub.

If you are one of the few still in the dark about it, I would tell you that BookBub is a company that markets eBooks via emails to a large list of subscribers. Subscribers designate their genres of interest, and each day they receive an email from BookBub with a few featured books in those genres. The author pays a fee for the one day feature of his book. In other words, BookBub makes its money on those fees, and the author makes money off his book sales. In order to get a listing on BookBub, an author must discount his book off its regular price.

BookBub first made waves a little over a year ago.  In the last fifteen months as its subscriber list has grown, BookBub has established itself as a site where people can really sell books, if only for the featured day and a short period thereafter.

Under the BB rules an author can only feature a specific book once every six months. If he has other titles, he can attempt to get a placement as frequently as once per month.  However, my experience, and from what I have read in other author’s blogs about BB, few authors are successful at obtaining placements that are less than six  months apart.

That gives you some idea of how many authors are vying for a spot on BB.

Author Robert B. Lowe first mentioned BB to me about a year ago, and I checked it out.

The cost of admission is steep.

I decided to take the plunge, paid my money and got a spot mid-January 2013. I had to take a slot where the book ran for $1.99, which meant I took a hit on my royalty levels.

But BB delivered a lot of sales, and I saw good Amazon rankings for quite a while.

Then came the post BB drought.

Many have written about this process of feast or famine in the digital world of book sales.

It just is what it is for the time being.  The only way to sell books is to promote them, and effective places for Indie authors to promote their books are few.

I tried in vain for several months to get back on BB.  Then last July a spot opened up for me at the last minute.

Again, I had to price the book at $1.99.  Again I had a  big surge in sales.

Fast forward another six months.

This time I decided to do something about which I was conflicted.

I applied for a 99 cent placement.

I know.  I know.  I can hear people saying, “Don’t offer your book for 99 cents because that sends the message that it isn’t worth much.”

Guess what?  I decided not only to offer Last One Chosen for 99 cents, but also to offer the other books in the trilogy for 99 cents.

Guess what?  I am also running my latest book The Compost Pile for 99 cents for a few days around the BB promo.

Why?

Because I want to leverage the BookBub feature anyway I can.  It’s as simple as that. While I have new eyeballs on my Amazon and Barnes&Noble book pages, I want them to load up as many of my books as they can.

I’ll let you know in a few days how things went.

And if you want to pick up a few of my books while they are on a deep discount, please be my guest.