In brief. There are twenty-five places that can genuinely send readers to a self-published book in 2026 — and about five more that every roundup lists alongside them but which are not platforms at all. Most roundups list them and give each a star rating pulled out of the air. This one rates every platform on four things you can actually act on — impact, setup difficulty, technical skill and entry budget — and then gives you the number nobody else publishes: how many copies you have to sell to break even. Prices are the vendor’s own, with the date we checked them. Where two of a vendor’s own pages disagree, we print both.
Last reviewed by Robert Prime — 24 August 2026
How to read this page
Four ratings, one to five, plus the arithmetic.
| Rating | What 1 means | What 5 means |
|---|---|---|
| Impact | A handful of sales at best | Can move a book into a chart |
| Difficulty | Sign up and paste a link | Weeks of setup, ongoing management |
| Technical | If you can send an email, you can do it | Ad platforms, tracking, spreadsheets |
| Budget | Free or under £25 | £500+ per campaign |
First, a distinction most roundups get wrong. A platform has an audience of its own and can send you readers you did not already have. A multiplier has no audience — it changes what happens to readers who have already arrived. Amazon A+ Content, review copies and editorial quotes are multipliers. They matter enormously, and rating them next to BookBub’s 2.24 million subscribers is comparing a shop window to a high street. They get their own section at the end.
Break-even is the honest replacement for “ROI”. Nobody can tell you your return — it depends on your genre, your price, your series length and your backlist, and any site quoting you a hard ROI figure is guessing. What we can do is arithmetic: the platform’s published price, divided by your royalty per copy, is the number of copies you need before you have made a pound. That number is often the reason a promotion “didn’t work”.
Royalty assumptions used throughout: 35% on a $0.99 ebook (about $0.35 a copy) and 70% on a £2.99 ebook (about £2.09 a copy), which are Amazon’s published rates.
Ranked for a UK author with no existing audience. That is deliberate and it will look wrong to anyone expecting BookBub at number one. BookBub has the largest reach in the industry. It is also the platform most likely to take £900 off a debut author who has no series to read through into.
The short answer
These twenty-five can send you readers. Ranked for a UK author with no existing audience.
| # | Platform | Impact | Difficulty | Technical | Entry budget | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Your own email list | 5 | 3 | 2 | £0–£25/mo | Immediate |
| 2 | Amazon Ads | 5 | 3 | 4 | £5–£10/day | Better than 1 sale per 7 clicks |
| 3 | BookBub Featured Deal | 5 | 2 | 1 | $25–$4,216 | 2,733 copies (Crime, $0.99) |
| 4 | Freebooksy / Bargain Booksy | 4 | 1 | 1 | $25–$550 | 289 copies (Thriller, $0.99) |
| 5 | BookBub Ads | 4 | 4 | 4 | £5/day | £0.30–£1 per click |
| 6 | Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads | 4 | 4 | 4 | £10–£20/day | Roughly 1 sale per 5 clicks |
| 7 | BookTok / TikTok | 4 | 4 | 3 | £0 | Time, not money |
| 8 | Substack | 4 | 3 | 2 | £0 (10% if paid) | Owned audience |
| 9 | Kickstarter | 5 | 5 | 3 | ~10% of raise | Avg pledge $25 vs $7 |
| 10 | AI discovery | 4 | 3 | 3 | £0 | The channel nobody is working |
| 11 | Fussy Librarian | 3 | 1 | 1 | $10–$79 | 110 copies (Horror) |
| 12 | Other newsletter promos | 3 | 1 | 1 | $10–$100 | Varies by list |
| 13 | 3 | 3 | 2 | £0 | Time | |
| 14 | Goodreads | 3 | 2 | 1 | £0 | Discovery, not sales |
| 15 | NetGalley | 3 | 3 | 2 | $350–$599 | Trade reviews |
| 16 | Spotify for Authors | 3 | 3 | 2 | Production cost | Audiobook only |
| 17 | YouTube | 3 | 5 | 4 | £0 | Time, heavily |
| 18 | Goodreads Giveaway | 2 | 2 | 1 | $119–$599 | Reviews, not sales |
| 19 | Reedsy Discovery | 2 | 1 | 1 | $50 | One review |
| 20 | Bluesky | 2 | 2 | 1 | £0 | Time |
| 21 | StoryGraph | 2 | 1 | 1 | £0 | Discovery |
| 22 | Fable | 2 | 2 | 2 | £0 | Community |
| 23 | 2 | 3 | 2 | £0 | Long-tail | |
| 24 | 2 | 3 | 2 | £0 | Reputation risk | |
| 25 | Library distribution | 2 | 2 | 2 | £0 | Reach, not revenue |
Not on this list, deliberately: Amazon A+ Content, review copies, editorial reviews, KDP Select free runs and your own direct store. Every other roundup ranks those alongside BookBub. They have no audience of their own, so they cannot be ranked on reach — they are multipliers, and they get their own section.
Tier one: where a debut should actually start
1. Your own email list
Impact 5 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget £0–£25/month
The only audience nobody can take away from you, price you out of, or throttle with an algorithm change. A list of 500 engaged readers will out-sell a BookBub slot for most debuts, and it costs nothing per launch.
Break-even is immediate — there is no per-campaign cost, only the platform fee. Most tools are free under 500–1,000 subscribers.
Do this first. Everything below works better when you have somewhere to send the traffic. See our newsletter platform comparison and newsletter content strategy.
2. Amazon Ads
Impact 5 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 4 · Budget £5–£10/day
Advertising to people already holding a credit card on the shop where your book is sold. That is a shorter path to a sale than any social platform.
The break-even nobody tells you. At £0.30 a click on a £2.99 ebook earning £2.09 at 70%, you need better than one sale per seven clicks to make money. Most authors convert at one in fifteen and cannot work out why the spend never returns. Run £5–£10 a day to gather data before you scale.
Amazon Ads · our Amazon Ads for authors guide
Tier two: paid reach that can genuinely work
3. BookBub Featured Deal
Impact 5 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 1 · Budget $25–$4,216
The largest reach in the industry, and the hardest to get — acceptance is editorial and most submissions are rejected. Prices are per category and per discount price.
Verified from BookBub’s own pricing page, 24 August 2026:
| Category | Subscribers | Free | $0.99 | $3+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crime Fiction | 2,240,000+ | $758 | $947 | $3,566 |
| Psychological Thrillers | 1,850,000+ | $740 | $925 | $3,487 |
| Historical Fiction | 1,760,000+ | $897 | $1,109 | $4,216 |
| Action and Adventure | 1,480,000+ | $612 | $761 | $2,879 |
| Contemporary Romance | 1,340,000+ | $620 | $765 | $2,910 |
BookBub states click-to-purchase conversion of roughly 20–30%.
Break-even: a Crime Fiction slot at $0.99 costs $947. At 35% royalty you earn about $0.35 a copy, so you need 2,733 sales before you are level. That is achievable with a series behind it. For a standalone debut it usually is not, and this is the single most common way a new author loses four figures.
4. Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy
Impact 4 · Difficulty 1 · Technical 1 · Budget $25–$550
The sensible first paid promotion. Genre-targeted, published list sizes, and an order of magnitude cheaper than BookBub.
Verified from Freebooksy’s pricing page, which states prices effective 4 February 2025:
| Genre | List size | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Romance Series Promotion | 736,000 | $245 |
| Mystery | 922,000 | $100 |
| Thriller | 807,000 | $100 |
| Fantasy/Paranormal | 582,000 | $110 |
| Science Fiction | 431,000 | $75 |
| Literary Fiction | 514,000 | $60 |
| Travel | 303,000 | $30 |
| Limelight Email | 281,000 | $550 |
Break-even: a $100 Thriller feature at $0.99 needs 289 copies. That is a realistic target, which is exactly why this tier is the right place to start.
5. The Fussy Librarian
Impact 3 · Difficulty 1 · Technical 1 · Budget $10–$79
Cheap, genre-targeted, and reliable for a first paid test.
A conflict worth knowing about. Fussy Librarian’s own pricing page lists free-ebook promotions at $79 for Mystery and Thriller, $38 for Horror, $15 for African-American — but that page states its free-ebook prices were last updated January 2023 and its bargain prices January 2022. A 2026 update article on the same site implies materially lower figures, around $43 at the top. We could not reconcile the two. Check the live price at checkout before you budget.
6. BookBub Ads
Impact 4 · Difficulty 4 · Technical 4 · Budget from £5/day
Different product from the Featured Deal — self-serve CPC ads to BookBub’s audience, with no editorial gatekeeping. You buy clicks at £0.30–£1 and you can start at £5 a day rather than £900 in one go.
Harder than it looks: it rewards good ad creative and punishes everything else. See our BookBub Ads CPC guide and Amazon Ads vs BookBub Ads.
7. Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram)
Impact 4 · Difficulty 4 · Technical 4 · Budget £10–£20/day
Enormous targeting power, and a longer path to purchase than Amazon Ads — the reader has to leave the platform to buy. Budget £10–£20 a day and give each test three to five days before judging it.
Our Facebook Ads for authors guide has the setup.
8. The other newsletter promo sites
Impact 3 · Difficulty 1 · Technical 1 · Budget $10–$100
Robin Reads, E-Reader News Today, BookSends, Book Barbarian for SFF. Individually small; stacked on the same week they compound. This is how experienced authors build a promo “stack” rather than betting on one slot.
Our newsletter promo sites guide compares them.
Tier three: discovery and community
9. BookTok and TikTok
Impact 4 · Difficulty 4 · Technical 3 · Budget £0
The only platform where an unknown book can still go from nothing to a chart. It is also the one with the worst effort-to-outcome ratio for most authors — the winners post consistently for months.
Cost is time, not money, which makes the break-even question different: what is a month of your evenings worth against a $100 Freebooksy slot?
Our BookTok marketing guide is the practical version.
10. Substack
Impact 4 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget £0, or 10% of paid subscriptions
The most interesting shift of the last two years. Substack is an email list with a built-in discovery layer — Notes brings you readers, which a standalone newsletter tool cannot.
There is no infrastructure for selling books directly, so it is an audience-building channel, not a sales channel. Treat it as platform 1 with a front door.
11. Instagram and Goodreads
Instagram: Impact 3 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget £0. Strong for covers and author brand, weak for direct conversion. Goodreads: Impact 3 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 1 · Budget £0. Where readers verify a book before buying. Claim your author profile — it is free and it ranks.
12. Goodreads Giveaways
Impact 2 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 1 · Budget $119–$599
Two tiers — $119 standard, $599 premium, checked 24 August 2026. For print you also pay for the books and the postage.
It buys shelf-adds and some reviews, not sales. At $119 for an ebook giveaway it is an expensive way to buy a handful of ratings, and we would spend that on Freebooksy first.
13. Bluesky, StoryGraph, Fable, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit
All free, all time-expensive, all worth exactly as much as your consistency.
Bluesky has more genuine literary culture than the platform it replaced. StoryGraph is where the readers who left Goodreads went. Fable is a social reading app with real community. Pinterest is the only one of these with a long tail — a pin can drive traffic two years later. YouTube has the highest ceiling and the highest production cost of anything on this page. Reddit will punish self-promotion faster than any other platform; participate for a year before you mention your book.
Tier four: reviews and credibility
14. NetGalley
Impact 3 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget $350–$599 for 3–6 months
Librarians, booksellers and trade reviewers. Genuine value if you are pushing for library and bookshop distribution; poor value if you just want Amazon reviews, which is what most indies actually want.
Co-op routes cut the cost significantly. Our NetGalley for indie authors guide has the detail.
15. Reedsy Discovery
Impact 2 · Difficulty 1 · Technical 1 · Budget $50
$50 to put your book in front of Reedsy’s reviewer pool, checked 24 August 2026. You get a review; you are not guaranteed a good one. Cheap, low effort, modest return.
Tier five: alternative routes, and the one nobody is working
16. Kickstarter
Impact 5 · Difficulty 5 · Technical 3 · Budget about 10% of what you raise
The highest-ceiling channel on this page and the most work. Kickstarter takes 5% and payment processing 3–5%, so roughly 10% all-in — against up to 30% at retail.
The number that matters: the average pledge is about $25, against roughly $7 on Amazon. First-time authors typically raise $2,000–$15,000; established ones $20,000–$100,000+. Romance, romantasy and SFF special editions perform best.
It only works if you already have an audience, which is why it sits at the bottom of the page and the top of the ambition list.
17. Spotify for Authors
Impact 3 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget audiobook production
The fastest-growing audiobook channel of 2026, with Discovery Clips giving authors something close to a BookTok mechanic for audio. AI narration has reached a quality level where an audio edition is now viable for almost any book, which changes the maths that used to rule audiobooks out.
18. Library distribution
Impact 2 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 2 · Budget £0
Reach and legitimacy rather than revenue, and it is blocked entirely by KDP Select exclusivity. See library distribution.
19. AI discovery — the channel nobody is working
Impact 4 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 3 · Budget £0
Readers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Amazon’s Rufus what to read next. Those systems recommend books based on what they can find and parse about them — and almost no indie author has done anything deliberate about it.
This is the one platform on this page where the competition is essentially zero, which is exactly why it is rated 4 for impact on a £0 budget. It is also invisible in Search Console, so most authors do not know whether it is working.
We built AI Discoverability for Authors because of this gap, so treat that as the bias it is — but the free AI visibility check will tell you where you stand without buying anything.
The five multipliers — not platforms, and not optional
None of these will bring you a single reader. All of them change what happens to the readers the twenty-five platforms above send you. Get them wrong and every pound of promotion works against you: advertising a listing that does not convert simply pays to show more people something that does not sell.
| Multiplier | What it actually does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| ARC and review team | Social proof. A book with 50 reviews converts far better than one with 9 | £0–$145 |
| Amazon A+ Content | Lifts conversion on traffic you are already paying for | £0 DIY, or from £149 |
| KDP Select free run | Makes the book free so the newsletter platforms have something to feature | £0, costs exclusivity |
| Editorial reviews | A pull-quote for the cover and the listing | $99–$575 |
| Direct sales | Keeps 90%+ instead of 30–70%, and gives you the reader’s email | £0–£29/mo |
The order matters more than the spend. Fix the multipliers before you buy traffic.
ARC and review team
Impact 4 · Difficulty 3 · Technical 2 · Budget £0–$145
Reviews are conversion infrastructure, not promotion. A book with nine reviews converts worse than the same book with fifty, and every pound you spend on ads before you have reviews works harder against you.
BookSirens is pay-per-download — roughly $145 to reach about 50 reviews, checked 24 August 2026. Booksprout is a monthly subscription from $9 to $29 (some sources list up to $59). Or run it yourself from your email list for nothing.
BookSirens · Booksprout · our BookSirens review
KDP Select free run and Countdown Deals
Impact 4 · Difficulty 1 · Technical 1 · Budget £0
Five free days per 90-day enrolment period. The cost is exclusivity — you cannot sell the ebook anywhere else, which rules out Kobo, Apple and library distribution.
Break-even is read-through: a free run only pays if the reader buys book two. For a standalone debut, a free run mostly buys you rank and a handful of reviews. Weigh it properly in KDP Select vs wide.
Amazon A+ Content
Impact 3 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 3 · Budget £0 (DIY) or from £149
Free to use through KDP and it lifts conversion on traffic you are already paying for. That makes it a multiplier on everything else rather than a source of readers itself.
Our A+ Content service starts at £149 if you would rather not build it.
Editorial reviews
Impact 2 · Difficulty 2 · Technical 1 · Budget $99–$575
Kirkus Indie, BlueInk, IndieReader. A pull-quote for the cover and the Amazon listing. It buys credibility, not readers — worth it if you are querying libraries, festivals or foreign rights, hard to justify otherwise.
See our BlueInk review and BookLife review.
Direct sales
Impact 4 · Difficulty 4 · Technical 4 · Budget £0–£29/month
Selling from your own site keeps 90%+ instead of 30–70%, and gives you the customer’s email address — which no retailer will ever hand over. Payhip and Shopify both work.
The catch is that you must supply all the traffic yourself. Direct sales multiply an existing audience; they do not create one.
The order we would actually spend in
- Email list — before anything else
- ARC team — get to 25+ reviews
- A+ Content — free conversion lift
- Amazon Ads at £5/day — learn your click-to-sale rate
- One $75–$100 newsletter promo — Freebooksy tier, not BookBub
- Only then consider a Featured Deal, and only with a series behind it
The mistake we see most often is running that list backwards: a £900 Featured Deal on a standalone debut with eleven reviews and no email list to catch the traffic.
What we could not verify
- The Fussy Librarian’s current prices. Their own pricing page carries 2022 and 2023 update dates; a 2026 article on the same site implies lower figures. We print both and tell you to check at checkout.
- Freebooksy’s prices are dated 4 February 2025 on their own page. They are the vendor’s published figures, but they are not fresh.
- Any ROI figure, for any platform on this page. Nobody publishes reliable data, so we publish break-even arithmetic instead.
- Booksprout’s top tier. Sources list $29 and $59 as the ceiling. We could not resolve it from the vendor page.
- BookBub acceptance rates. BookBub does not publish what proportion of submissions are accepted.
- Whether the click-to-purchase range BookBub publishes (20–30%) holds for debut standalone titles. It is their figure across all partners.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best platform to promote a book in 2026?
For an author with no existing audience, your own email list, then Amazon Ads. For an author with a series and a budget, a BookBub Featured Deal has the largest reach of any platform — 2.24 million subscribers in Crime Fiction alone. The best platform depends entirely on whether you have anywhere to send the traffic.
How much does it cost to promote a book?
From nothing to several thousand pounds. A Fussy Librarian slot starts around $10–$79, Freebooksy runs $25–$550, and a BookBub Featured Deal ranges from $612 to $4,216 depending on category and price point. Amazon Ads and Meta Ads have no entry fee — you set a daily budget, typically £5–£20.
Are BookBub Featured Deals worth it?
They have the biggest reach in the industry and the highest chance of losing a debut author four figures. A Crime Fiction slot at $0.99 costs $947, which is about 2,733 copies at 35% royalty before you break even. Worth it with a series to read through into; rarely worth it for a standalone first book.
What is the cheapest way to promote a book?
Your email list, an ARC team run from it, Amazon A+ Content, and a claimed Goodreads profile — all free. The cheapest paid option that reliably does something is a genre-matched newsletter promo at $25–$100.
Do I need to pay for book promotion at all?
No. Every free channel on this page — email, BookTok, Substack, Goodreads, Bluesky, StoryGraph, AI discovery — costs time instead of money. Paid promotion buys speed, not outcomes, and it amplifies whatever your book already does. If the book does not convert on its own listing, advertising it makes the problem more expensive rather than fixing it.
