Create & manage promotional pricing campaigns

You can:

  • Offer limited time discounts on your books on Google Play in the Partner Center.
  • Set up a promotion to change the list price of your book for a specified date range.
    • During this time, the book may be featured on the Google Play store or in Google Play marketing emails. Afterward, the book returns to its original list price.

Tip: To promote a book, the book must already be available for sale.

  • To view, edit, or create promo codes and price promotions: Click Promotions in the Partner Center.
  • If you can't view the promotions page: Ask the administrator of your account to grant you Book Catalog access.
  • To schedule promotional prices at a book level: In the "Pricing" section or through ONIX, you must provide book prices with start and end dates.
  • If you set promotions that overlap: The promotion with the lowest price takes effect.

Create a promotion

To schedule a new promotion, click Select promo type and then Promotional pricing.

You must provide:

  • Name for the promotion.
  • Start date: The promotion takes effect on this day at 00:00 based on the earliest time zone where the book is available for purchase.
  • End date: The promotion expires on this day at 23:59 based on the earliest time zone where the book is available for purchase.
    • To schedule a one day promotion, use the same start and end dates.
  • Which books you'd like to include in the promotion.

Select books

  1. From the dropdown list under “Identifier,” select books to include in the promotion.
  2. For each book, select criteria for the promotion:
    • Country
    • Currency
    • Promo price
    • To add additional promotional prices or currencies: Click Add .

Tip: Alternatively, to add promotional prices in bulk, select Use a CSV instead.

View details

Important: While a promotion is in progress, the promotional prices aren’t reflected in the Pricing tabs on the books’ detail pages.

Under the “Promotional Pricing” tab, you can view a list of your promotions and their details:

  • Number of titles included
  • Start and end date
  • Status of the promotion

You can also download a report of the promotion.

Tip: For more details, click the name of the promotion. You’ll find a list of books included in the promotion and their promotional prices.

Edit a promotion

You can't edit the details of an existing promotion. To pause, remove, end, or duplicate the promotion, click Edit Promotion.

Important: You can't overwrite a promotion by creating a new one with the same name. You must delete the old promotion before you create its replacement.

Remove a promotion

To delete a scheduled promotion before it begins:

  1. Next to the promotion, click Edit Promotion and then Remove.
  2. The listing is removed from the page.

To remove a promotion in progress:

  1. Next to the promotion, click Edit Promotion and then End.
  2. The promotion’s status changes to "Ended" and its end date is updated.
    • Within 24 hours, promotional prices won’t apply to your books.

Use a CSV file for promotional pricing

To apply promotional pricing in bulk, you can upload a CSV file.

  1. Under "Book Selection," select Search for books or upload with CSV.
  2. Select Upload a CSV using the template.
  3. Open the template with a spreadsheet program.

Tip: The column headers differ from the column headers found in the .csv file downloaded from the Book Catalog.

Required column headers

Important: Only the following column headers will be accepted:

  • Identifier ISBN
    • In this column, provide ISBNs.
  • Title
    • This column can be left blank.
  • Currency
    • Use this column to set a promotional price without currency conversion. For example, you can list the price as $1.99 USD for the United States and £1.99 GBP for the United Kingdom.
  • Amount
    • Enter the promotional price.
    • Do not include the currency symbol.
  • Countries
    • Countries where the promotion should apply.

    • To allow promotional prices in countries that use a different currency, currency conversion must be turned on.

Format & encoding

Save your promotion book list as a tab-separated, Unicode-encoded (UTF-16LE) .csv file.

Errors

If there are any issues when you process your .csv file, the promotion's status displays as "Has errors." Click the status to download another .csv file that lists the errors.

Example

Here's an example of a spreadsheet that will discount a book to $1.99 USD in the United States, and £0.99 UK in the United Kingdom. A different book will be discounted to $3.00 USD or the local equivalent in all sales territories.

Identifier Title Currency Amount Countries
ISBN:1234567890123 Optional Title USD 1.99 US
ISBN:1234567890123 Optional Title GBP 0.99 GB
ISBN:9780123456789 Optional Title 2 USD 3.00 WORLD

To apply more than one promotional price to the same book during the same promotion period, make each price a separate row.

Tip: If currency conversion is turned on, you can use the keyword WORLD to apply the promotional price to each of your sales territories.

Need more help?

Try these next steps:

Want a quicker way to get help?

Chat with a member of the Google Books team.

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