After fourteen rejections, as I outlined on episode 247, I finally landed a BookBub Featured Deal. Once I tallied up my results, I had lost more than $4,000 running the promotion. I’ll tell you why, and why I’d still do another BookBub Featured Deal in a heartbeat. My BookBub Featured Deal Results Book: The Heart to Start: Stop Procrastinating & Start Creating BookBub Category: Advice and How-To Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 List Price: $9.99 Deal Price: $1.99 Territory: United States BookBub Promotion Fee: $1,008 Promotion Size: ~1,000,000 subscribers Copies Sold: 2,541 Revenue: $1,841 Supplemental Ad Spend: $4,847 Total Profit (Loss): ($4,014)   The breakdown of copies sold (across all countries): Amazon: 2,236 Apple: 204 Barnes & Noble: 49 Google: 36 Kobo: 16 Total Copies Sold: 2,541   The breakdown of revenue results (across all countries): Amazon: $1,462 Apple: $266 Barnes & Noble: $59 Google: $34 Kobo: $19 Total Revenue: $1,841   Overall ad spend results, broken down by network: BookBub Ads: $1,910 BookBub Featured Deal: $1,008 Amazon: $1,761 Facebook: $1,187 Instagram influencers: $185 Total Ad Spend: $6,051 My BookBub Featured Deal made my book a bestseller across several categories The Heart to Start ranked as high as: #136 overall on Amazon #1 in Self-Help/Creativity #1 in Arts & Photography #1 in Entrepreneurship & Small Business #6 overall in Self-Help #6 overall in Business & Investing Three reasons my BookBub Featured Deal results were poor (financially) The three main reasons I lost $4,000 running my BookBub Featured Deal are: I was trying for a bestseller list I poorly allocated advertising spend throughout the promotion I poorly allocated advertising spend amongst platforms 1. I was trying for the WSJ bestseller list Word on the street is, to qualify for the Wall Street Journal nonfiction ebook best-seller list, you need to sell 3,000–5,000 ebooks in a week, in the U.S. Supposedly you need to sell at least 500 of those copies in a single non-Amazon channel to trigger reporting to the list. I contemplated not trying for the list and instead reaping what profits I could, but decided to go for it. I felt The Heart to Start was a longshot, but was curious to learn so I could later apply what I learned on my then-upcoming-now-out book, Mind Management, Not Time Management (read about my BookBub Featured New Release results for my new book). Despite spending more than $6,000 on the promotion, I did not break the 3,000-copy barrier. Here is my sales breakdown for U.S. sales (the above sales are worldwide): Sales (U.S.) Amazon: 2,123 B&N: 51 (countries unknown) Apple: 185 Kobo: 7 Google: 29 Total U.S. Copies Sold: 2,395 As you can see, perhaps harder than selling 3,000 copies overall is selling 500 copies in a non-Amazon channel (for this book in this genre with my audience, anyway).   2. I poorly allocated ad spend throughout the promotion I broke my ad spend down into three buckets: Warm Up: Starting around 10 days before the promotion, I built awareness about my book to “warm up” the audience, so they would act more readily when the deal hit their inboxes. During: The day of and a couple days after my promotion, I advertised the discount (where possible). Last Day: The final day of the promotion, I advertised the discount, with messaging that it was the last day (where possible). My ad spend results amongst these three buckets: Warm Up: $2,225 (46%) During: $1,477 (30%) Last Day: $1,145 (24%) Total: $4,847 I do not recommend this allocation. Without much time to plan my promotion, I got overly-zealous, and spent way too much early on. By the time I got to the Last Day, I was trigger shy and didn’t want to spend more money. If anything, this should have been reversed. The last day of any promotion will generally get you more bang for your buck. In the future, I plan to spend 50% of budget on the Last Day. 3. I poorly allocate