Why Promote With Us?
We are a powerful and effective method of reaching a designated audience of voracious urban fiction readers. It’s an opportunity to introduce your book and brand to new readers, and possibly gain new fans in the process. (Please note: The information on this page generally relates to the promotion of ebooks. Please Contact Us if you wish to promote paperbacks.)
How It Works
Promoting with us is pretty simple and straightforward:
- Complete the appropriate submission form (Free Book of the Day or Standard Book Listing), including selection of your promotion date
- Make sure your title is discounted on your chosen promo date
- We feature your title in our daily newsletter and on our website
You can view our prices here.
Requirements
We are highly supportive of authors and lean more towards being inclusive rather than exclusive when it comes to promoting with us. That said, there are some minimum standards we find it necessary to mandate in order to ensure our subscribers have the best experience possible. At present, the requirements are as follows:
- Your book must be African-American/Urban Fiction. We generally anticipate that this includes the genres of “Urban Fiction/Street Lit,” “African-American Romance,” “African-American Women’s Fiction” and “African-American Literature/Fiction.” To the extent that we define any of these terms, we do so loosely as our intent, again, is to be inclusive rather than exclusive. More to the point, we subscribe to the honor system, and leave it authors to determine the categories that their books fall under rather than base it on our own interpretation.
- Free, Discounted, or Bargain-Priced. Our subscribers are interested in deals. Thus, we are looking to promote books that are “priced to sell,” so to speak. With that understanding, although we will promote full-priced books, in no instance will we promote a title priced above $2.99.
- A professional, full-length book. Generally, your title should have an attractive cover and be properly edited, well-formatted, and error-free. While we don’t have a formal page-length requirement, we anticipate that most promoted books will be over 100 pages in length.
- Rating and Availability. Your title should have a star rating of at least 3.5 and a minimum of five reviews on Amazon.com. (For new releases, we will waive the rating/review requirement if the author has another title with at least ten reviews.) Your book should also be available on at least one major retailer (e.g., Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.).
- Frequency. We will not promote the same title more than once within a 30-day period.
We reserve the right to reject any title, at any time, for any reason. Thus, even if your book meets the above requirements, we may ultimately decide not to promote it, in which case we will provide a full refund of any promotional fees paid. Please click below to submit a Free Book of the Day or Standard Book Listing.
Free Book of the Day
As the verbiage implies, there is only one “Free Book of the Day” each day. This slot gets premium positioning at the top of both the daily newsletter and the daily bargains listed on the website. In short, it provides maximum exposure for your free title, whether permafree or simply discounted for a limited time. (FYI: You can also submit a free book as a Standard Listing.)
Tips For Having a Great Promotion
As the author/publisher, there are numerous things you can do to ensure a great promotion, including the following:
Promote only first-in-series and standalone novels. While we will promote the second, third, and other books in a series, focusing your promotion efforts on the first book in a series or standalone novels is likely to provide the best returns.
Pricing. Because our readers are focused on deals, we recommend pricing your title at free or $.99. At a minimum, we suggest a discount of at least 50%. As previously stated, we will promote titles up to a price of $2.99, but there’s generally a direct correlation between pricing and purchases: the higher the price, the fewer the sales.
Space out promotions. Although you can advertise the same title with us every 30 days, we suggest promoting the same book no more than once every 90 days. Likewise, while we love having you promote with us, we would advise that you not promote the same author/pen name with us more than once every two weeks.