For one of my New Year’s resolutions, I decided to start taking action on the things I said I would do. One of those things was to use the eBook submission tool offered by Book Marketing Tools.
Thinking about using the eBook submission tool to market your books? Before you do, let me tell you about my experience using this marketing tool for my books.
I am a self-published author, and when it comes to promoting my books, I used to spend hours manually submitting my eBook to various free book promotion sites. This method was tedious, time-consuming, and boring. I prefer to spend my time writing rather than promoting my eBooks, but book marketing and promotion are some of the tasks that a self-published author must do to reach thousands of targeted readers.
I heard about the eBook submission tool when I subscribed to the Book Marketing Tools newsletter. The makers of this marketing tool promised that I would only have to fill in one form and be able to submit my eBook to more than 25 book promotion sites in 5 minutes or less.
Now, this marketing tool sounded very attractive to me because it meant that I would have more time to write than to waste time trying to submit my eBook manually to several book promotion sites. So I decided to try the eBook submission tool to see what results I would get.
Signing up to use the eBook submission tool is easy and straightforward. It costs $29 to use the marketing tool. I used my debit card to pay for one credit. This means I paid $29 to promote only one of my eBooks.
The Book Marketing Tools website has a lot of Google ads which made it difficult for me to submit my eBook. They have positioned the ads in the wrong place. There was a ‘use credit’ button that I had to click on to get to the page to submit my eBook but the Google ads were partially covering up the ‘use credit’ button.
I tried clicking on the button a few times, but I kept clicking on the Google ad instead which opened a new page. I had to refresh the page a couple of times to finally be able to click the ‘use credit’ button.
Book Marketing Tools had a list of over 25 book promotion sites where I could submit my eBook and all I had to do was click on each one and then click the submit button. The information I entered about my book was already prepopulated on the forms. However, there were some forms that still needed to be filled in such as entering the genre of my eBook, the number of reviews it has, and what category it fits in.
Unfortunately, I was only able to submit my eBook to 17 out of the 25 book promotion sites. The submission was successful for some, but others came up with an error message.
I also noticed that some book promotion sites required my eBook to have 5 or more reviews. Sadly, my eBook had none at the time, but it would not allow me to submit my eBook without filling in that field.
For the book promotion sites that produced an error message, I tried to submit my eBook to them again, but the error message still came up a second time. I just thought those sites don’t want to or can’t accept my eBook submission the way I did it.
I did a 5-day free book promotion of my book The Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing using the eBook submission tool offered by Book Marketing Tools. I checked the number of downloads on Amazon KDP as that is where I published my book. The numbers were very disappointing. For the 5-day free book promotion, I only got 4 downloads of my eBook. I was not happy with the results.
I asked myself a few questions that might have affected the number of downloads of my book. Did I set the dates of the promotion too soon? Should I have submitted my eBook for promotion two weeks in advance? Did I promote my book at the wrong time of the year?
I did not have many answers to the questions above. I just knew that I spent $29 to use the eBook submission tool to promote my eBook and I was unsuccessful. Instead of reaching a wide range of readers, I lost money using a marketing tool that did not work for me.
Would I recommend the eBook submission tool to promote your eBooks? No, I would not. Unfortunately, until I find a better eBook submission tool, I will have to continue submitting my eBook manually to book promotion sites. I have a few that I have submitted my eBook to in the past and I have been satisfied with the results. I will continue to search for other book promotion sites to add to my list and come up with my own fast way of submitting my eBook to those sites.
Have you ever used the eBook submission tool offered by Book Marketing Tools? Let me know in the comments your experience of using the marketing tool and what results you got.
READ MORE
Amazon’s Marketing Tools for Authors
RECOMMENDED READING
The Beginner’s Guide to Book Marketing
