Yes, there is BookBub.com. It’s right up there with the ginormous Goodreads as a top spot for recommendations and book lists. Pretty much every post or anecdote I’ve heard about BookBub emphasizes how amazing it is when it comes to promotion. I believe those posts, and I’m happy for those authors but . . .
accurate depiction of me, considering BookBub ad prices
BookBub will promote you, and it will work, but it’s also common knowledge that it will cost you roughly an entire month’s worth of income. At least.
If you’re already swimming with the big fishies, this post isn’t for you. This is more the little-fish-happy-with-little-budgets type post. And for us smaller fishies, I would like to recommend AllAuthor.com
They’ve recently added some new features to their already impressive list and I am very happy with the price tag. Let me break it down for you.
Joining the site is free. In the first tier you pay 0$ and you get:
A basic author page (here is mine, as an example). Listed in their directory (which is nice and visual, not just a text list). Up to 4 books on your page. And a Tweet scheduler that handles up to 100 tweets for you at a time.
Obviously this is less awesome if you have more than four books you’d like to promote, but if you’re a brand-new author or have multiple pen names in different genres with four good strong books for each, this could be a great budget option. The basic author profile is pretty nice. It looks polished and professional. It features your four book covers, large and rendered 3-D. You can add reviews, buy links, and teasers. It links to your Twitter account so you can easily create and schedule tweets. Piracy monitoring, where you can scan for your book being hacked. And a views and clicks report for your author page, showing who clicked on what and where they went from there. (Creepy, yes, I grant you, but super useful.)
feeling pretty cool on my basic tier
In the second tier part 1 (which AllAuthor doesn’t list but I’m calling a tier anyway for clarity) you pay 34$ to “feature” one of your books and you get:
All of the above, plus automatic Tweets about your featured book for six months (AllAuthor tweets to their accounts, in addition to you tweeting to yours). AllAuthor also helps you create a review Gif maker, which looks like this:
I just plugged in a tiny bit of one of my reviews, and AllAuthor did the rest.
They also help you create a promotional Gif banner for your featured book. You choose from several pre-formatted options, click “create”, download, and use the result on your social media. It’s sized to work with Facebook the best, but I’m assuming you can use it wherever it fits.
And (! yes, there’s another and!) AllAuthor creates cover mockups for you to use in your social media promotion. This one you do nothing to create, AllAuthor just sends it to your email. A different mockup every Wednesday for you to save and use. They look like this:
Worth 34$? I think so.
In the second tier part 2 (also not listed as an actual choice by AllAuthor, it was just the mid-range price option) you pay 25$ and you get:
All of the basic features plus a neat social media widget that condenses every single one of your social media feeds in one spot. You give AllAuthor your url addresses and they set it up on your page. You can also display this widget on your own personal website as a standalone “Social media feed” page. This second option is kind of an a la carte feature. It won’t make your book a “featured” book, that’s the additional 34$ I mentioned above. So, potentially, you could pay to feature your book, plus pay for this social media feed, and spend 59$ total.
Or, you can pay 59$ to join the third tier as a Pro author. In return, you get:
A more customizable Pro author page. All of your books listed, not just four. One of your books becomes a “featured” book automatically, instead of you paying the 34$ fee. You also get all of the featured goodies, the gif review maker, the promotional banners, and the social media promotion from AllAuthor. You also get a more detailed insights report for your author page. The ability to list your book on the Deal Directory when it’s on sale (Free, Kindle Unlimited, and .99c books are all eligible.)
The downsides:
That 59$ fee to become a Pro author is 59$ . . . for six months. So in reality you’d pay 118$ a year for all of these features. Kind of a gotcha, but they do spell it out clearly on their pricing page. It’s not hidden.
AllAuthor has 51,500 followers on Twitter, this is true. I clicked on my book’s “featured” tweets and discovered it’s basically a tweet factory that no one is actually looking at anymore. You know how they tell you not to blast “buy my book” over and over? That’s what AllAuthor is doing. There’s zero engagement. It’s pure promotion, which TBH is what I paid for.
Also, the chosen promotion platform is Twitter, which has started to show up in the Oxford Dictionary under the definition for “Toxic Dumpster Fire”. So there’s that.
So is AllAuthor.com a good option for your author toolbox?
If you’re a newer author without a ton of books to your name, if you’re on a smaller budget than BookBub demands, and if you’d like the promotional gifs and banners done for you for a smaller fee than freelance graphic artists charge, yes. AllAuthor is a good deal.
If you’re more established, you already have your promotional materials covered, and you’re all set up elsewhere, probably not. You’ll have to look over the options and decide for yourself. Hopefully this breakdown has made that easier for you to do, since I wrote this post with the idea of being useful for you.