my experience with eBookBooster

My book Blood Brothers has been out for a little over a month, and I'm trying to spread the word. To that end, I recently paid for the services offered by eBookBooster, an ebook promotion website that I found out about through J.A. Konrath's blog. I figured I'd write about that experience here, to let other self-publishing authors know how it went for me.

If you go to eBookBooster's webpage, you'll see it's a pretty simple affair. Basically, the website offers to "Submit Your eBook to 45+ Sites for Only $40!" The thought is that you fill out a form once, on eBookBooster's webpage, and then eBookBooster uses that information to submit your book to a group of websites that feature bargain and temporarily-free eBooks. The websites in question are listed in a separate column on the left side of the page.

It sounded good to me, and J.A. Konrath--a guru of self publishing--recommended it. So I paid the $40, entered my book's information, and crossed my fingers.

When the first day of my promotion came around a few weeks later, I went back to eBookBooster.com to follow the links on the left-side of the page. I wanted to make sure that mention of my book had appeared on those sites. I got about halfway through the list, and I started to notice a few things.

First of all, almost none of the sites had mention of my book on their homepages. I dug a little deeper, clicking through to other pages or sometimes doing a site search for "Blood Brothers", and in the end only 6 sites (of the first 20+) had any sort of mention of my book, at all. (And frankly, the value of a mention that you have to search for seems pretty minimal. If it isn't on their homepage, it probably won't be seen by very many people).

Second, a few of the sites seemed to have almost nothing to do with books. Freebies 4 mom, for example, is mostly a listing site for moisturizer samples and coupons for Pampers.

In the end, I've had better results with previous promotions without using eBookBooster or any other promotion company. I suppose it's possible that my superior results with past promotions relate to the possibility that free-download promotions don't really work nearly as well as they used to. There's no way to really know.

But one thing I do know: I'm not planning on using eBookBooster again.