Checking Book Promoters

Once you've published your book or ebook it won't take long before you start getting offers to promote your book. But how do you discover if a promotion is real or a scam?

Here's what you may face:

1. You receive an email offering to promote your book to 150,000 people on Twitter/X. The email is from someone with a gmail address and points you at a website full of promotion offers and glowing author reviews. It looks fantastic and the price seems quite reasonable. They offer tweets every day for a month, a listing on their website, and your book promoted in a newsletter sent to 50,000 people.
2. You are invited to enter your book in a literary competition with winners being invited to a conference at which the overall winner will be selected. The overall winner will receive a publishing contract.
3. You are offered a writing course which will teach you how to become a best selling author.
4. You are told Twitter/X,  Facebook and other social media sites are effective marketing platforms but only if you have thousands of followers. You can however, buy followers for a small fee.  
5. You are directed to a website on which you can place free copies of your books. You pay a membership fee for access. You can read other free ebooks on the site if you agree to write positive reviews for them. In exchange other authors will review your books.

Here's what can be wrong with these offers

1. Email offers: a. Be very cautious of any offer coming from someone with a free email account.     The chances are these people are being paid an affiliate fee to persuade you to pay for promotion. If you do pay, you may well find you get the same affiliate account offer from the website owner who is more interested in being at the head of a pyramid scheme than in promoting your books.
     b. Look for which Twitter/X accounts the website will use and check how many followers they have. Are these followers genuine people? There are sites available e.g. Twitter Audit which will allow you to check followers. There is no point tweeting about your book to fake followers or people who have not been on Twitter/X for years. Beware of any sites which promise to tweet your book to thousands of followers but fail to tell you which Twitter/X accounts they will use. I was recently invited to use a book promotion site (which I won't name). I checked them out. They feature recommendations from authors who are selling about one book a month, Claim 208,000 Twitter/X followers but only identify one account with 79,000 followers of which 27% are real.
2. Competitions: Does the 'competition' ask for an entry fee? Have you ever heard of the literary 'award'? If not, try looking it up using a search engine and adding the word 'scam'. Does it offer that 'Finalists' in the competition will be invited to a conference at a hotel where the final decision will be made. In the fine print you'll probably find you must travel there at your own expense and pay for accommodation. 
3. Courses: You'll find many courses available on how you can become a 'best seller'. But what does 'best seller' actually mean? If you are a #1 best seller in the genre 'romance' then this is a significant achievement. You'll probably have a 'best selling in Kindle' rank of #1 also and be selling 10,500 ebooks a day. But if you are a #1 best seller in 'Engineering & transportation in Arabic' then you'll have a 'Best selling in Kindle' rank of something like 2,800,000 and be very lucky to sell one book a month.
   Q. Where do you find the 'Best selling in Kindle (or books)' rank?
   A. On any book or ebook page scroll down to the 'details' section and you'll find it there directly above the 'Best selling in [genre]' ranks.
   Q. How do I get an estimate of sales from the 'Best selling in Kindle/books' rank?
   A. There's a very useful page on Internet which will work this out for you. Find it at TCK Publishing. Enter the sales rank without the # or commas.
   Note - not all courses offered are useless. There are some I trust and who often give free advice in their newsletters.
4. Buying followers: On Twitter/X this is a waste of money. The followers will be fakes and will disappear when Twitter/X gets round to checking them. Trying to sell followers on Twitter/X is against their rules, so is buying them! You may lose your account. Some rogue promotion websites buy 'followers' when they start up to make their promotion offerings look good.
5. Reviews: Buying or trading reviews is against Amazon's terms and conditions. If Amazon discover this, your Amazon account and books will be deleted.  

How do I find if a promotion site uses fake followers?

There are sites which can help you do this. I recommend:

• https://www.twitteraudit.com/ - You can use this site free or subscribe if you want to test more than one site/user. Here's the sort of results you can expect:
  
  
  @bookbub's Twitter following isn't too bad but has too many fake and low quality followers. The only thing that saves them is the huge number of followers they have. Multiply that by their overall score and you get 107,000
  
  
  @discountbookman has a much better audit score but has far fewer followers. Multiply their followers by their score and you get 5,904
  
  @bookpings is much better than they were in 2019 when I last tested them. Then they had 73.3% fake followers. They still have an alarmingly high percentage of low quality followers - people who are inactive and seldom visit Twitter/X. Multiply their followers by their overall score and you get zero. Further investigation revealed they have glowing references from authors who sell one book a month! I personally wouldn't promote a book using them.

Which promotion sites do you recommend?

There is a clear leader for effective book promotion websites, https://bookbub.com It's effective because of its email lists which target readers of the sort of books you write. It also has a huge following and advertises to keep that following growing. Unfortunately it is very expensive to promote there, prices range from about $150 to $1,000 depending on genre, and not all promotions are accepted. Unless you manage the promotion very badly, you will make back more than the cost of the promotion.

Less expensive but still effective promotion websites are:

•  FreeBooksy - Great for free ebook giveaways.
• Fussy Librarian
• Robin Reads
• E-Reader News Today (ENT) 
• Book Barbarian - great for science fiction
• Red Feather Romance - great for, you guessed it, romance.