Tools of the Trade – Bookbub

As you may have gathered by now, I am a voracious reader. I am also on a budget. That means I’m always on the lookout for how I can get books for not a lot of money. Enter Bookbub. It’s a site that sends you a daily email containing Kindle e-books that are either free or very discounted. You tell it which genres you are interested in, and it will only send you those genres.

So that’s the basic idea. I occasionally find it overwhelming – so many books, so little time! – and I have bought some books from them that I didn’t like or that were just simply not written well. I don’t know what their selection process is, it seems to have something to do with how well the book is rated on Amazon, but they don’t read every book they recommend, which is fair enough – they’d need to employ hundreds of readers to keep up (pick me! pick me!).

I have found Bookbub works best for snagging books that I already knew of and wanted to try, or authors I’m already familiar with. For a while, I felt compelled to buy every free book that looked even remotely interesting, but I’ve been able to reign that in. Some people are happy to have hundreds and hundreds of books on their e-readers that they have no intention of ever reading, but I do better with a well curated selection – I like to know what I have on my e-reader and why. I’ll either read it or delete it, so I don’t have to look at it anymore, even if I paid for it.

So that’s Bookbub in a nutshell. What about you? Do you subscribe to any free book emails?