Buchdeals – The next German BookBub?

A lot of authors want to know if Germany has “something like Bookbub” – a website that promotes your book deals to their large newsletter. Well, there are a lot of similar services for German authors (you can find a list of ebook promotion websites here) ‑ but is there anything that will work like a “magic bullet”? Perhaps not, but Buchdeals, a company promoting free and bargain ebook deals to German readers, is worth a look.

In a recent interview on the Selfpublisher-Podcast by Henri Apell (the only German podcast on selfpublishing so far), Alexander Iwanow from Buchdeals talked about their service that provides readers with daily ebook deals via newsletter and app. He said, „We wanted to model the successful concept of BookBub.”

In the beginning, it was just an app that auto-filled with free books from the Kindle Store. Later, they added an email newsletter. The app is called “Buch des Tages” = book of the day, and is available for free on iTunes, Google Play, etc. On the app, readers are presented with a special tip for one free ebooks every day (the book of the day). To date, the app has been downloaded 150,000 times.

Their newsletter has currently around 25,000 subscribers and presents several books per day. In contrast to the app, authors can advertise not only free, but also bargain ebook deals on the newsletter. The most popular genres of Buchdeals subscribers are romance and mystery/thriller as well as nonfiction books on nutrition/diets, or cook books.

Buchdeals guarantees a placement in the Top 10 Free Kindle store for every book featured as the book of the day on the app. The fee for this is currently 49€.

Even though they don’t make the same claim for ebook deals advertised only on their newsletter, the small fee of 4.90€ or 9.90€ (for free and bargain deals, respectively), makes this a worthwhile site to try, considering the size of their newsletter.

But in order to book an ad on Buchdeals, you need to fulfill certain requirements:

• The book has to be 50% reduced or free (permafree titles are acceptable).
• Highest quality (no formatting or grammar errors, great cover, good reviews – if a book doesn’t have any, they’ll look at other books by the author)
• The books need to be a certain length (for fiction at least 120 pages, nonfiction 80 pages, children’s books 20 pages)
• You can only run a Buchdeals promotion every 3 months.

So, I’d say if Buchdeals continues to expand their subscriber base even more, perhaps they will become the next German Bookbub in the future. I’ve used Buchdeals multiple times for different books and have had good experiences with them, although I can’t be more specific about the results because I always had other ads at the same time. Read on here about my experiences with a free promo on Buchdeals and other sites.