As usual, I’m at my standing desk doing squats (poorly). I’m in the throes of marketing bliss as I find ways to promote my book.

I check on the sales of my book Shirley Link & The Black Cat.

They’re dip-tastic.

Time for a promotion.

So I plan until my brain stem hurts: the right day, the right level of social sharing, the right promotional materials… You know the drill.

Now all I have to do is post my book to the book listing sites! Wheee! So let’s see. That means I get to…

… scour through my bookmarks to find sites that still exist.

… excavate the correct submission page and read through the site rules that run, on average, 4,987 words.

… enter the same information over and over until I hate my name/book title/genre/sub-genre/description…

Of course, even with all of this work, there is no guarantee that my book will actually appear on the promotional site.

Can I lick the floor instead?

So when I heard about Book Marketing Tools’ ebook submission tool I stopped doing my lame squats. Book Marketing Tools promises to let you easily promote your book on 30 of the top free/deal sites. How easy? Like one-click per site. Fifteen minutes from start to finish.

This isn’t like Authors Marketing Club’s tool where they list out the links and send you off to fill out the form to promote your book. It’s a service that promises to make the submissions easy. That’s a promise I’m delighted to take them up on.

How does the ebook submission tool work?

I headed in with high hopes and low expectations. I’ve been burned by promotional tools before.

So I was pleased to find a good-looking site that told me what it did and got me into work-mode fast. The service asks you to enter some basic data about you and your book. It’s the same info you’re usually asked to enter on the deal sites. ASIN, Title, Author, Genre, Author bio. The idea here is that you should only need to enter the data once for all 30 sites.

When you finish with that step, you get this…

See the list of sites with the light gray backdrops? Those are the ones that you can submit to automatically. All you have to do is click on the first site (Awesome Gang) and a pop-up window appears. You verify the pre-populated info and click on the ‘Next’ button.

Repeat 29 times.

Did it work? Yup. Some of the steps required an extra few seconds of data entry, but the process took only 15 minutes! Fifteen minutes to promote your book on 30 sites. Wow.

I think my favorite part was watching dozens of verification emails flood my inbox one after another.

Unfortunately, the blue-button sites at the bottom of the dashboard screen cannot be filled automatically. They act more like the AMC tool — sending you off to the correct submission pages where you do the heavy lifting. Still, it’s nice to have the list in one place.

With all of its strengths, I’d like to see the tool track two things:

1) Which of the sites under the “Additional sites you can submit to” header did I submit to already? I’d like to check it off my list once I’m done submitting manually.

2) What’s the success rate of the submissions? Did Edreader News Today show my book on promo day, or not? I’d use this service to track my progress if it had the tools.

But won’t the submission sites be angry about this new service? Not if they think it through. I discovered a bunch of sites I’d never heard of before on the dashboard. Besides, when I submit to a promo site I’m not there to browse. I want to submit my book and move on. That’s not the behavior of a valuable visitor. In my opinion, promotional sites should work with Book Marketing Tools to make things as easy as possible for us. It’s a logical way to strengthen their services and their brands.

So yes, the ebook submission tool can help you promote your book to 30 sites in 15 minutes, as advertised. If I could track details of my promotions then Book Marketing Tools could become one of my default browser tabs.

The price is $29 per book promo. That seems a little steep to me, but I might do it to save myself a couple of  hours of work.

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you.

By Ben Zackheim

Disclaimer: Book Marketing Tools reached out to me and offered me a $5 credit to test their new tool. I’m posting my experience, which was a good one.