Promotion and Also Bought list

[JRTomlin]

It is no secret that promotions can screw up your also bought list, but this time it has been so extreme, I am seriously considering not doing any more paid promotions and sticking to mailing list promotions.

I just finished a BB promo for A Kingdom's Cost. It was okay and has more than paid for itself BUT it apparently totally wiped out the AB list of eight pages that were full of similar novels -- which meant of course that at least at times Amazon would recommend it to those readers. Now it has 5 items on the AB list, not one of which is even close to the same genre. It may take months to get the AB list back to right and in the meantime, the novel is highly unlikely to get Amazon recommendations.

Is it worth it? I did get an unusually high number of sign-ups to my mailing list so there is that. But messing up your AB list has always been a disadvantage of paid promotions and that has me worried. That has always been a bread and butter series, and you have to move the first one.

[notthatamanda]

Something's weird. How many downloads did you get on the bookbub? You don't have to answer that, but it must have been a couple of thousand right? And only 5 also boughts? On a book that has over 600 reviews so it must have been bought thousands and thousands of times? Which would generate a lot of also boughts?

Was the bookbub free if you don't mind my asking? Or 99 cents?

Edit - I just checked.  My WW II historical fiction right now has three pages, all appropriate, but the day it launched it had 29 pages of also boughts, based on the preorders alone, which were only I think 29 or so. Maybe it was your bookbub that messed it up, or maybe it was just a coincidence and Amazon changed something, badly.

[JRTomlin]

It was free and had about 20,000 downloads. (If it had only been a couple of thousand, you really would have seen some hysterics. 😜) Two days ago it had 8 or 10 pages of also bought and now 5 items on one page. It doesn't even make sense. I kept going back and reloading the page thinking there was some minor loading glitch but nope. I am probably over-reacting but I have never seen anything like it.

I checked some other novels and they all seem to have normal also boughts. *throws up hands and runs in circles, screaming*

Sorry. I'll calm down now. Or try anyway.

[notthatamanda]

Nope you are free to run around like a crazy person, but I do think it is just them messing with also boughts, not that your promotion killed it.

8 to 10 pages of also boughts is also low, but better than 5 books that don't make sense. Congrats on the promotion though.

[Lu Kudzoza]

I used to have a broad advertising strategy and it messed up my also boughts. There were a bunch of books that weren't good matches for mine. The way I fixed it was to narrow my advertising targets to only good matches. Then I set up an auto AMS ad where I added as a negative search term any book in my also boughts that wasn't a good match. I also changed my keywords in the KDP dashboard to narrow the categories and search results to things that are very closely related to the book.

It took about 3 months before the books with the negative targeting ads started dropping out of the also boughts. By six months it was completely clean of them. So, I think recency of the purchase has something to do with the also boughts. Over time hopefully you'll be able to fix yours.

[JRTomlin]

8 to 10 pages of ABs is pretty typical in HF when your purchases are narrowly targetted. Every single one on my AB list was a medieval historical fiction.  It has now gone up to about 5 pages and not a single one an appropriate genre match. It is important for what is on the list to be a close match and believe me I'd prefer 10 pages of close matches to 30 of poor matches.

You can't 'narrow your targets' when you run Bookbub promotions. That's not how that kind of promotions work. They advertise to their genre list. None of those come from my AMS advertising, however they may make my AMS advertising harder since I am pretty sure AMS uses also bought as a predictive factor.

I have never had a Bookbub promotion totally destroy my AB list as this one did and I have to seriously consider not running BB promotions in the future.

[notthatamanda]

I guess it must be your niche. I've seen 30+ pages of also boughts for WW II fiction. I hope it gets straightened out for you soon.

[JRTomlin]

It is that there are a more limited number of writers writing the subcategory I suspect so it tends to 'bunch up'. Even some of the big names in the subcategory don't have that many pages of AB. Bernard Cornwell's 'The Last Kingdom' that was made into a series (and he is certainly the biggest selling in the category) only has 6 pages on his AB list for that novel.

And in the midst of threatening never to do another BB promotion and having a hissy fit, I should say that my sales are very good on the tail of the promotion. It is having a very good sell-through to the rest of my backlist. This is not that Bookbub did something wrong by any means.

ETA: However I do question whether a Bookbub promotion is the right way to go for a novel that is the start for a bread-and-butter series.

I was re-reading Chris Fox's 'Six Figure Author' (I'm not one by the way) and he discussed this problem. He suggested not doing BB type promotions for new novels since it would keep them from establishing a good list for a good 30 day start when Amazon is likely to promote your novel. It might be something to at least consider for novels that have been out for a while too as that one has.

I might be more likely to consider BB in the future for my Stewart Chronicles. I was thinking of a BB promotion for my Son of Scotland series when the 3rd comes out at Christmas and this is very seriously giving me pause.

[Lu Kudzoza]

You can't 'narrow your targets' when you run Bookbub promotions. That's not how that kind of promotions work. They advertise to their genre list. None of those come from my AMS advertising, however they may make my AMS advertising harder since I am pretty sure AMS uses also bought as a predictive factor.

I understand that you can't narrow targeting with Bookbub. I was just trying to help you clean up the mess the BB promotion created. By focusing all my future advertising and getting my book out of categories that weren't a perfect match my also boughts resolved themselves.

[JRTomlin]

You can't 'narrow your targets' when you run Bookbub promotions. That's not how that kind of promotions work. They advertise to their genre list. None of those come from my AMS advertising, however they may make my AMS advertising harder since I am pretty sure AMS uses also bought as a predictive factor.

I understand that you can't narrow targeting with Bookbub. I was just trying to help you clean up the mess the BB promotion created. By focusing all my future advertising and getting my book out of categories that weren't a perfect match my also boughts resolved themselves.

Thanks for the suggestion.