The Full-Price Tour: Why Booking Stops During a 99-Cent Promotion Usually Cannibalizes the Sale

You have a 99-cent promotion scheduled. You also have a tour to book. The instinct is to line them up: the promo creates urgency, the tour creates attention, and the two together should move units. That instinct is worth examining before you send a single pitch email, because the arithmetic underneath it is less friendly than it looks.

This is not an argument against discounting. It is an argument about sequencing: a tour stop is a full-price attention asset, and booking it inside a 99-cent window spends that asset at the moment when the per-unit return is lowest. The fix is not to cancel the promo or the tour. It is to separate the two calendars and change what each stop asks the reader to do.

Start with the royalty math, not the marketing plan

Before you decide whether a stop should point at $0.99 or $4.99, you need to know what a sale actually pays you at each price. On Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the answer depends on which royalty option your book is enrolled in.

KDP offers two royalty options. The 35% option pays 35% of list price without VAT. The 70% option pays 70% of list price without VAT, less delivery costs, which KDP describes as averaging $0.06 per unit and varying by file size (KDP eBook Royalties).

The 70% option is not available at every price. On Amazon.com, the 70% royalty band runs from $2.99 to $12.99 (KDP eBook List Price Requirements). A $0.99 list price falls outside that band, so a 99-cent sale runs through the 35% option.

Run the numbers on a single US sale before VAT:

• $0.99 at 35%: roughly $0.35 per sale.
• $2.99 at 70%: 70% of $2.99 is about $2.09, less delivery costs of roughly $0.06, so roughly $2.03 per sale.

That is not a small gap. One $2.99 sale at the 70% option pays roughly what six 99-cent sales pay at the 35% option. If your tour stop sends ten readers to a 99-cent page, you have earned about $3.50. If the same stop sends ten readers to a $2.99 page, you have earned about $20. The stop cost you the same hours either way.

This is the first thing to internalize: a 99-cent promotion is a royalty-structure decision before it is a marketing decision. The price changes what each unit of attention is worth to you, and it changes it by a factor of roughly six.

What “full price” means depends on the platform, not on your feelings

Authors often talk about “full price” as if it were a fixed property of the book. It is not. It is a platform-specific construct, and the platforms define it for their own purposes.

BookBub, for example, defines the full price of a book as its predominant recent price, and requires a Featured Deal submission to be discounted at least 50% off that price (BookBub Submission Requirements and Advice). That definition exists so BookBub can promise its readers a genuine deal. It is not a statement about what your book is worth, and it is not a rule you need to apply to your tour.

The same page contains a detail worth sitting with. BookBub states it has seen a significant decrease in sales for Featured Deals between $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99, and advises that the deal price should depend on the author’s marketing goals, listing bestseller lists, series marketing, and sales or revenue as distinct goals. In other words, even the platform most associated with deep discounting treats the price point as a goal-dependent choice, not a default.

So when a host asks whether your stop should feature the 99-cent price, the honest answer is: it depends on what the stop is for. That is a design question, and you are allowed to answer it before the host does.

The tour stop is a full-price asset

Here is the argument in one sentence: a tour stop buys you a reader’s attention at a moment when they are willing to consider your book, and the value of that attention is highest when the book is at full price and lowest when it is at 99 cents.

That is not a measured finding. No retrieved source tracks tour-stop conversion during price promotions, and anyone who tells you the cannibalization rate is X percent is inventing a number. What the sources do support is the royalty arithmetic above, and the arithmetic is enough to make the design question sharp.

Consider what a stop actually produces. A host publishes a post, a Q&A, an excerpt, or a review. Some readers click through. Of those, some buy, some sign up for your list, some follow you, and most do nothing. The stop’s cost is your time: the pitch, the guest post, the follow-up, the thank-you. That cost is fixed regardless of your price.

If the stop’s call to action is “buy it for 99 cents,” you have converted a fixed-cost attention asset into a low-margin transaction. If the stop’s call to action is “buy it at full price” or “join the list and hear when the next book opens,” you have converted the same asset into a higher-margin transaction or a durable relationship. The stop did not get cheaper. The return got worse.

This is what people mean when they say a promo cannibalizes the sale, and it is worth being precise about the mechanism. The promo does not steal sales from the tour. It changes the price at which the tour’s attention is redeemed. The tour was always going to send some readers to the buy page. The promo decides what those readers pay when they get there.

When a 99-cent stop is the right call

There are real cases where booking a stop inside the promo window is correct. The rule is not “never.” The rule is “change the call to action.”

List growth. If your list is under 5,000 subscribers and you have no publicist, a stop that produces email signups is often worth more than a stop that produces sales. A 99-cent price lowers the barrier to a first purchase, and a first purchase is a reasonable moment to ask for a signup. In that case, the stop’s CTA should be the signup, with the 99-cent price as the reason to act now, not the thing you are trying to profit from.

Review generation. A discounted window can produce a burst of readers who are willing to leave a review. If your book has fewer than a few dozen reviews and the next full-price push depends on social proof, a promo-window stop with a review request as the CTA can be a reasonable trade. Price the trade honestly: you are buying reviews with margin.

Series entry. If the 99-cent book is the first in a series and the later books are full price, the promo-window stop can be a customer-acquisition cost. That only works if the later books exist, are linked, and are priced to convert. If book two is not out yet, you are buying a reader you cannot yet sell to.

In each of these cases, the stop is not a sales stop. It is a list stop, a review stop, or a series-entry stop. The mistake is booking it as a sales stop and then judging it by sales.

Stop design: place stops at the edges of the window

The cleanest fix is calendar design. Treat the promo as a short burst and the tour as a longer arc, and place stops at the edges of the burst rather than in the middle of it.

Before the window. A stop that runs a week or two before the promo can point at full price and build the list that the promo will later activate. The reader who buys at full price is your best reader; the reader who signs up before the promo is your best promo audience.

After the window. A stop that runs a week or two after the promo can point at full price and catch the readers who heard about the book during the promo but did not act. This is where the full-price sale actually happens, and it is the stop most authors skip.

Inside the window. If a stop must land inside the promo, change the CTA. Ask for the signup, the review, or the follow. Do not ask for the sale and then wonder why the sale was small.

This sequencing has a cost: it stretches the tour over a longer period, which means more weeks of pitching and follow-up. If your available hours are tight, the honest trade is fewer stops placed well rather than more stops placed badly. A tour of six stops at the edges of a promo will usually beat a tour of twelve stops crammed into the promo week, because the twelve-stop version spends every stop at the lowest-margin moment.

Host recruitment and the price clause

Hosts are not mind readers. If you do not tell them which price the stop should link to, they will link to whatever is live when they publish, which during a promo is the 99-cent price. That is how a full-price stop becomes a discount stop without anyone deciding it should.

Put the price in the agreement. A clause like this is enough:

“This stop is scheduled for [date], outside the promotional window for [book title]. Please link to the standard retail price and describe the book at its standard price. If the book is temporarily discounted at the time of publication, please link to the author’s newsletter signup instead of the retailer page, and note that the discount is temporary.”

That is a hypothetical clause, not a legal template. Have it reviewed if your situation warrants it. The point is that the price is a term of the agreement, not an afterthought.

Some hosts will push back. They may prefer to feature the discount because it performs better for their audience. That is a legitimate preference, and you can accommodate it by moving that stop into the promo window and changing its CTA to the signup. What you should not do is let a host feature the 99-cent price on a stop you designed as a full-price asset and then count the resulting sales as tour revenue. They are promo sales, and they should be attributed as such.

Attribution: split the three numbers

You cannot tell whether the tour cannibalized or compounded the sale unless you separate three numbers:

1. Sales during the promo window. These are promo sales. Some would have happened anyway; most are price-driven.
2. Sales after the promo window. These are the full-price sales the tour is supposed to produce. If this number is flat or zero, the tour did not compound the promo.
3. Signups during the promo window. These are list-growth events. They are not revenue, and they should not be counted as revenue.

Use UTM parameters on every tour link so you can tell which stop sent which traffic. Use a distinct signup form or a tagged link for tour stops so signups are attributable. Check your retailer dashboard for the post-promo period, not just the promo week. Draft2Digital’s Promotions Tab lets authors schedule price promotions and free promotions and see recent sales, which is useful for the wide-distribution side of this (Draft2Digital). Smashwords notes that publishers earn 75% list on books priced $2.99 or higher, which is another reason the post-promo price matters to your net (Smashwords).

The judgment rule is simple. A promo that produces signups but no full-price follow-through is a list event, not a revenue event. Judge the tour on list growth in that case, and price the tour in hours accordingly. A promo that produces full-price sales after the window is a revenue event, and the tour earned its hours.

The debrief cadence

Run the debrief at three points, not one.

Before the promo. What did the pre-window stops cost in hours? What did they produce in signups and full-price sales? What will you change about the pitch or the CTA?

During the promo. Which stops landed inside the window, and what was their CTA? If the CTA was the sale, note the per-unit return and decide whether to move that stop next time.

After the promo. What did the post-window stops produce at full price? Did the signups convert? If not, the tour was a list event, and the next tour should be designed as one.

Each debrief should answer three questions: what happened, what it cost, and what to change. If you cannot answer the cost question in hours or dollars, you cannot answer the change question.

A decision checklist

Before you book a single stop, answer these in writing:

• Royalty option. Is the book on the 35% or 70% option, and does the promo price fall inside the 70% band? If not, you are running the promo at roughly $0.35 per US sale.
• Promo window length. How many days is the price actually live? Shorter windows are easier to route stops around.
• Stop placement. How many stops are before the window, inside it, and after it? If the answer is “most inside,” redesign.
• CTA per stop. Is each stop asking for a sale, a signup, or a review? Match the CTA to the price live on that date.
• Host clause. Does the agreement specify which price the stop links to?
• Attribution. Can you separate promo-window sales, post-window sales, and promo-window signups?
• The one metric. What single number tells you whether the tour compounded the sale? For most solo authors, it is post-window full-price sales, not promo-week units.

The 99-cent promo is not the enemy. Booking full-price attention assets at discount-price moments is. Separate the calendars, change the CTA where the window overlaps, put the price in the host agreement, and judge the tour on what happens after the price goes back up.