EbookFairs Review: A New Marketing Channel for Authors?

One great marketing tactic is to combine forces with other authors in your genre or subject, and create a group promotion.  

This is where there is a landing spot for all of your books, and each author works to send traffic through their social media, or email or whatever marketing tactic they know/have so as to improve everyone’s reach. 

Because it is a group of authors making efforts, this allows your readers to find other books, and other authors do the same for yours.  

However, orchestrating something like this takes a lot of effort, know-how and a bit of web development acumen. Plus, it’s really hard to find other authors that aren’t just coasting and will actually put forth effort, so everyone wins.  

However, if you can pull this off, it really is effective.

So, how is an author supposed to do these things? Well, recently, I had someone reach out about a new service that was designed for this sort of thing, EbookFairs. 

Now, I’ve seen things like this come and go. So, I was a bit skeptical. But I decided to give it a try and check it out.  

So let's dive in and see what this author service can do for us.

What Is EbookFairs?

EbookFairs is a service for authors that lets authors coordinate virtual “fairs” where authors collectively promote each other's books in a group promotion.

This is similar to other services like those provided by Book Funnel or StoryOrigin, but in this case the administrative team at EbookFairs lends a hand with promotional material, specialty links to ensure everyone is participating well, and other technical assists.

Basically, it's an easy way to coordinate large group promotions with other authors.

Who Is EbookFairs For?

EbookFairs is not for everyone. Experienced authors who already have a good idea about how to coordinate large group promotions with other authors will find the service unnecessary.

However, most authors have yet to make a living at their work, and may have little to no expertise in coordinating a large group promotion.

That's where EbookFairs can really help. It's a great tool for anyone without any technical knowledge who just wants to promote their book alongside others with as little friction as possible.

How Does EbookFairs Work?

The process of using EbookFairs goes something like this:

Step 1: Create an Account

Creating an account is relatively simple, although keep in mind that you will need to pay before you can access most of the features. Still, you can set up your author profile once you’re in.

Step 2: Add Books

Once you have your profile ready, and you’ve paid for EbookFairs, you can add all of your books to their database. These are the books you will be including in each individual fair, so select any books you intend to promote. 

I found that adding my books was relatively easy, since you can automatically load in the book’s information by including your Amazon ASIN number, which then pulls your book title, link, image, etc. It was a very easy process (although I recommend looking it all over to make sure everything checks out first).

Step 3: Creating and Joining a Fair

Once you’ve added your books, you can either create a fair or join one made by someone else. This is a relatively straightforward process, made easy by the platforms easy to use navigation.

If you’re creating your own fair, you’ll see a screen similar to what you see below where you can add details about your fair, the genre/theme that it will be about, etc.

Step 4: the Fair Is Analyzed

Once the fair has been filled with submissions, it is up to the fair owner to review them and make sure they are appropriate for the book fair.

Step 5: The Actual Fair

Once the fair begins, certain things are locked into place, including the submissions, which can no longer be added or removed, and your links are generated automatically. Each author has their own link that will track the number of incoming visitors to your page using your link.

EbookFairs also provides some promotional materials that you can use when promoting your ebook fair.

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Step 6: You Promote

Once the ebook fair is live, all of the authors participating can then promote the fair, bringing in traffic from social media, email newsletters, etc.

One of the nice things about EbookFairs, is that they gamify the sharing process by having small rewards available to authors who come in first, second, and third for most visitors to the page.

This is a great way to increase engagement, and to make sure that each author is doing their part to share.

How Much Does EbookFairs Cost?

EbookFairs has two pricing structures:

• $9.99/month
• $99.99/year

You may be wondering, why would you want to pay for a service that provides group promotions? Can't you work with other authors to provide group promotions for free?

Yes you can, but it requires a lot more organization, and with a service like EbookFairs, you are not going to see very good results unless the authors involved have skin in the game.

I kind of like that everyone a part of this system has some skin in the game.  It makes it that most people doing this are going to take it very seriously.

In other words, by paying a small fee each month or year, you and the others participating are committed to using the system, and you are far more likely to do your part to promote the fairs that you are a part of, as are all other authors participating in the fair.

Additional Features

EbookFairs has more than just the fairs available for authors. They also have a number of useful tools, some of them powered by AI, that make the price tag a little bit more attractive.

Let's look at some of those.

Book Reviews

EbookFairs allows you to create a book ARC that you can use to share with potential readers to give you a review. This is a feature similar to what you can also find on StoryOrigin, and is a highly convenient way to share your book with individual arc readers.

AI Cover Checker

Have you ever wondered if your book cover matched other covers in your genre in general tone, feel, and color palette? Using AI, this tool provided by EbookFairs is able to give you a score on how well your book cover measures up to other covers in your genre.

AI Character Name Generator

Coming up with names is one of those pesky tasks that every author must face, and it's not always fun. With this name generator, you can put in information about your character, and it will give you some options on what you might name that character. It takes a little bit of the headache out of your brainstorming.

Barcode Generator

EbookFairs also provides a way to generate a barcode from an ISBN number. All you have to do is enter your information such as your ISBN number, your price, etc., and he will give you a barcode that you can use to customize your back cover.

Documentation

If you are ever confused about how you perform any particular task in EbookFairs, I'm happy to say that they have excellent documentation. Pretty much any question you would have about how to use their platform is answered in helpful videos that will walk you through the process.

Final Thoughts: Is EbookFairs Worth It?

EbookFairs is a really intriguing opportunity. I think this is a great place for those authors who are looking to work with other like-minded authors and build marketing momentum on their books.   

I personally, won’t continue to use it – not because it isn’t a great opportunity, but because I’ve had years in the publishing industry, and have a pre-developed network of authors I can work with that I know will make efforts as a whole. I also have an extensive background in web development and could create a page to showcase all the books in one landing spot (Although, I’m not sure I could build their incentive program or tracking system).  

Therefore, it wouldn’t be something that I’d personally need for my marketing efforts. 

However, if you don’t have a network of like minded and motivated authors, nor the web development skills to create something like this, and you are looking for more help from other authors so as to extend your reach to new readers, then this is a very good service to look into. 

Personally, I wish this had existed when I first started or was just starting to get going.