WATERSPELL: Affordable Legitimate Book Promotion: Written Word Media vs Book Cave

Affordable Legitimate Book Promotion: Written Word Media vs Book Cave

I try to place at least one promotion per month in a newsletter or email such as Book Barbarian, Fussy Librarian, Robin Reads, or the Freebooksy or Bargain Booksy options at Written Word Media. As a service to my fellow and sister authors, I make an annual report on the results. (Details here, with clickable links to the various book-promo sites that I’ve used.)

I’ve long chafed at the prices that Written Word Media charges. Though it’s more affordable by far than BookBub is, I still think $170 for a Freebooksy Fantasy/Paranormal “full series” promo is too much. I’ve been looking for a less expensive alternative, and my first experience with Book Cave suggests I may have found one.

On April 8, 2026, I ran a series promotion with Written Word Media, at a cost of $170. As shown in the graphic, that promo resulted in 601 book orders for my Waterspell series at Amazon, the majority of those (469) coming on the actual day (a Wednesday) of the “one-day” promotion. But experience has taught me that many people don’t open their emails until a day or two after the promo runs. The five-day cumulative numbers give a truer picture of the promo’s relative success. After the initial first-day flurry, another 132 orders were placed over the next four days, bringing the five-day grand total to 601.

Book promotion sites: Written Word Media vs. Book Cave

Then I ran a full-series promotion (for the six books of Waterspell) at Book Cave, a place I have only recently discovered. Unlike Written Word Media, which offers one-day full-series promotions, you can schedule a multi-day promo at Book Cave at no extra cost for the extra days. My series promo ran from May 30 through June 7. And though it cost only $71, it delivered results very comparable to what Written Word Media had brought in: 577 total orders at Amazon, the majority of them (469 again, seemingly the magic number) coming on May 30–31 (Saturday–Sunday) and the rest (108) trickling in toward the tail-end of the promo period. For epic fantasy with a series add-on, Book Cave charges a cool $99 less than Written Word Media does. See the Cave’s price list here.

Granted, this is only my first experience with Book Cave. I’ve been running full-series promos at Written Word Media for several years, and it’s quite possible that their subscribers have seen my books featured so many times, they scroll past and look for newer titles. But to save $99, I will definitely choose the $71 promo at Book Cave the next time I want to promote my entire six-book series at one time in one place.

For those wanting to dig into this topic in greater detail, I’ll refer you to my earlier posts on my book promo efforts. From these reports, you’ll learn what promo sites I’ve used, and how successful (or not) they have been, at a cost of $45 to $65 at most of the sites I have tried: