We’d love to promote your book to our eager readers, but please review these guidelines carefully to see what we’re looking for. While any book can be made into a subscriber magnet, not every subscriber magnet will qualify for our featured magnet email. The following factors play into whether or not your book will be chosen for a feature. We want our customers to receive the best content-rated books, so if you have a great book, we’d love to present it to our subscribers. We each and every submission individually. You can see our magnet book subscriber lists and the pricing here.
How Your Subscriber Magnet Promotion Works
You offer your free ebook to our subscribers to download directly from our site, usually in exchange for the reader’s email that you can add to your newsletter. (NOTE: This is different from our regular RETAILER FEATURE DEALS that features your discounted book to be purchased from retailers.) A subscriber magnet is a great way to convert readers into lifelong fans and continue selling them your other books! With our magnet feature, your subscriber magnet cover and summary will be emailed to our subscribers on the first day of your promotion with us and will be listed under the Featured Deals section of our Book Cave Direct page for one week. Our magnet deals newsletter subscribers will then click on the link, go to our site, and download your book directly. You chose whether or not they must sign up to your newsletter to receive your book (most authors choose this).
Your subscriber magnet ebook may also be chosen to be featured as an “Book Cave Picks” and/or may be listed on social media, but that is not guaranteed. For social media posts, we generally choose books we feel will bring the most visitors to the site to see all the books we have. Keep in mind that the best marketing tool we have is the email we send directly to subscribers’ inboxes. The second is the website listing; we have thousands of visitors to the website every month.
The result? Our magnet deal subscribers find great, free content-rated books, and you gain new readers who you can market directly to in the future and who will likely go on to read your other books. We generally respond to requests for a magnet deal within a few days, but if you haven’t heard from us in 3 days, please contact us.
Note: Our featured magnet email goes out once a week, on Thursdays.
You Need an Account to Submit but You Won’t Receive Our Deals Emails
In order to submit a promotion, you will need an account. This is because we automatically save all the books you put in so you can easily choose them for future promotions. You can also see at a glance which books are under promotion, which have been accepted, and which are pending. Signing up for the author account will NOT sign you up for either our RETAILER or SUBSCRIBER MAGNET deals emails. If you are a reader and want to hear about deals, you will have to indicate that on your account preferences tab.
Author Newsletter
As a side benefit of submitting your first promotion, you’ll start receiving our weekly author newsletter that details our current promotion openings and opportunities, including magnets groups or discount coupons for our RETAILER promotions. In that newsletter, we also link to a blog post with our weekly author tips. You can subscribe or unsubscribe on your dashboard.
Book Appearance
Each submission is reviewed by an editor who is over the chosen genre. Editors will not approve books with excessive spelling and grammatical errors. Book cover, description, and overall appeal is also considered. Past acceptance is not a guarantee of future acceptance. Please see below for the genre and cover type that we do not accept.
Box Sets
We do not accept box sets on our featured magnet email unless they are all written by a single author (or co-writing team). Even if the submitter has read all the books, it’s unlikely they will be able to rate them efficiently, and unfortunately at this time, we cannot research the individual titles. The only exception to this are sets that are obviously religious or “sweet.” This mean all the reviews say the stories are sweet and the individual authors are known for publishing that type of work.
Promotion Dates
Variable promotion dates will result in a higher likelihood of acceptance. The newsletter only goes out once a week, so it fills up fast.
Content Rating
Rating your content is extremely important, and you are on your honor to do it correctly. Authors often receive reviews that state “This book has too much sex” or “This novel is rated G, and I was expecting more heat.” These reviews say nothing about the plot or writing skill but rather tell volumes about reader expectation. At Book Cave we want to meet reader expectation. This makes for better reviews, happier readers, and subsequent sales.
Swearing: Please do not underestimate your profanity, regardless of your own personal feelings on the subject. Readers who choose All Ages and Mild don’t care to see even mild swears. Often they choose books for their children this way. This goes the same for the lower swearing levels (Mild+ and Moderate). If you have an F-bomb, you can’t choose a rating less than Moderate+ profanity level. Otherwise, the people who don’t want profanity, or certain kinds of profanity, in their books have no choice. We find that generally authors underestimate their profanity by two levels, so do a check for swearing in your book by using the search feature in your word processing program. Your content is up to you, but please report it accurately to maintain the integrity of our site for your future promotions. Click here for more details about how to rate your profanity and crude humor/language.
Heat: Choose the most severe instance in your book. Choosing “no kissing or discussing intimacy” really means just that. To find readers who will love your book, click the right levels. For instance, unless has no kissing at all and a very bland storyline (in the view of an adult), a romance will rarely be for All Ages. And that’s okay! No one really thinks four-year-olds are eager to read romance.
Violence: If your book is a murder mystery or has similar violence, you cannot choose All Ages no matter how mild (unless your book is mind-numbingly boring). Even Christian books targeted for young teens will often have mild or moderate violence.
Do NOT pick an All Ages rating for a fiction title if the violence, heat, and language levels aren’t appropriate to read to a four-year-old. Other than that, don’t sweat the content rating too much. Just answer the questions as honestly as you can. If you have a specific question regarding content, please contact us, or write in the comment box what is a concern for you, and we’ll make the final decision on the rating. Authors who are reported for not choosing the appropriate content rating will not be chosen for future listings. Likewise, books that are submitted with an erroneous rating will not be accepted (i.e. a murder mystery with no violence level checked or a book rated All Ages that contains intimacy or swearing). We do review each and every submission before approving.
Genre
Authors need to choose one genre for their books. However, in an effort to provide a better experience for our subscribers, Book Cave reserves the right to change your chosen genre. For instance, if your book has a religious theme, please choose Religious & Inspirational or Christian Fiction instead of another genre for your work. If your work is primarily one genre, be it fantasy, or sci-fi, or mystery, or LGTBQ+, please choose that one so you will please the most readers looking for the kind of book you write. This prevents you from receiving bad reviews from readers who are not your target audience and who feel tricked into clicking. Unfortunately, while there may be more initial clicks if you choose a larger list, these do not translate to future sales because people really do sign up for the books they’re interested in. We strongly recommend targeting the people you are writing to or writing something different with a wider appeal. Again, we reserve the right to change the submitted genre or add to it because we want readers to have the best experience.
If you feel your book falls into two categories, please note that in the comments. Our editors have the ability to choose multiple genres when they approve your book, though doing so is rare because it means we have to use up two of the limited daily slots we have for books.
Note about YA Books
Unless they are religious in nature, all books that classify as teen & YA literature go into the “Teen & Young Adult Fiction, Realistic” or “Teen & Young Adult, Speculative (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Paranormal).” Please do not put them into the other categories, which are targeted toward adults. Children’s stories also need to go in the genres targeted for people who are signed up for children’s books.
At this time, there are some genres we have not yet added to our list. We are always striving to improve our business, so more categories may be added in the future. The genres we now have are a reflection of the top categories our current subscribers prefer.
Please Do Not Submit Polarizing Literature or Erotic Book Covers
On our featured magnet email, we currently do not accept literature, whether fiction or nonfiction, that is divisive in nature, especially if this literature might contribute to the chaotic atmosphere currently being propagated in the United States. This includes books that are serious and/or satire in nature, especially those targeting a specific political figure or group of people, regardless of the “side” you are promoting or mocking. You can use these books simply as subscriber magnets, and we’ll list them in our My Book Ratings database, but they will not be promoted on our magnet email or listed among the featured books on Book Cave Direct.
Books with titles that are blatantly erotic will also not be sent out in our emails. While we do feature select books with the Adult+ rating, our site is family friendly, so we won’t feature books whose covers have undressed women (or women who look undressed, even if critical parts are covered by a man’s arm or a title), men whose pants are too low or open, or models in overly suggestive positions (lying down or cuddling together half dressed). If the couple is dressed, kissing or hugging are okay. Books with any cover or title may, of course, be used as only subscriber magnets, and we’ll list them in our My Book Ratings database. We just don’t send them out in our magnet emails.
Promotion Frequency
We will feature the same book after a 90 day period and will not promote more than one book by the same author on the same day. Pen names are considered a separate author.
For best choice of dates, submit 3-12 weeks before your promotion begins. If you submit multiple books for promotion on the same day, we will not be able to run all of them. All books will be posted on our database of rated books, My Book Ratings, where all books have a permanent content-rated listing.
If Your Book Is Not Accepted for a Promotion
We wish we could comment more on each individual title, but that’s impossible. If your book is not accepted for a magnet promotion, please read these guidelines carefully, correct the listing, and resubmit. If you read these guidelines and still do not know why you weren’t accepted, please feel free to reach out or resubmit in four weeks. We have different needs at different times, depending on overall submissions, and the newsletter fills up fast. Please do not take any rejection as a reflection on your work or subject matter. We love career authors!
Our Email Lists
All content-rated magnets will be sent out to our email subscribers, but only on the first day of the promotion. Some of the books will also be posted on our social media sites.
Payment
All invoices must be paid within three days of submission approval or of your magnet promotion, whichever is less. So if you submit the minimum of five days before the promotion and you are accepted, you will have only two days to make the payment, but if you submit two weeks in advance, you will have three days to pay. You can see our pricing page here. We will send a reminder about an unpaid promotion, but then the promotion will be canceled to make room for other books.
Promotions are nonrefundable. We have saved that spot for you and only you, taking your genre and rating into account. However, if you let us know about any difficulty a week before your promotion, we may be able to switch days or books for you.
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