Adventures in Promoland: Giveaways

Standard

Since Near Death has come out, I’ve had to go pretty full fledged promo director to get the word out. There are plenty of options out there and I figured I’d share some  with you guys so you can look into them and see what would work for you.

Today’s discussion will be about giveaways.  Goodreads is a great option to check out.  If you have a book due out soon or released sometime within the past six months, you are eligible to hold a giveaway through the Goodreads website. The catch being that you must have a print version of your book and you must be the one to mail it out. Not so big a deal, right?

By listing a giveaway through the site it allows you to offer signed copies, which is a nice extra perk for the winner. You can send swag with them if you have it as well. You are the one to set the amount of time the giveaway runs for. While you don’t want it to run too long, to give it a week or so allows more people to notice and enter. Those people are getting to read your summary and many will add it to their To-Read shelves so if they don’t win one of the copies, they may still look to buy it. In the two days my giveaway has been running so far, over 240 people have entered and 70 new people have added it to their To-Read lists. Not too shabby. Obviously I don’t know how many people will follow through and pick it up after the contest, but I’ve got to think some of them will be interested enough to do so!

Another giveaway option is to offer book bloggers and reviewers copies of your book to give away to their audience when they post their review or interview about you. I think this is especially a great way to get the word out because people will be reading the blogger’s review and will already “know” someone who has (hopefully) enjoyed the book.  The perk with this avenue is that you’re not limited to printed copies. While a printed book is a bit nicer a prize, you can offer more copies when it comes to digital. You can also combine it with a Kindlegraph so you can personalize a signing for the winners.

Remember, giveaways do not have to be limited to books! Lots of readers love swag. With so many internet printing companies out there, it can be pretty affordable to have things made to represent your book from posters of the cover, to buttons to bookmarks. When bookmarks are one hundred for three bucks, think about how many you can mail out or even pass out to people, possibly even giving them to librarians and teachers if your books are for kids or teens. They can use them as rewards for their students and prompt the interest in your book for your age group.

Offering free copies of your book and swag is a great way to spread the word about your writing without spending a ton of money. I’m sure there are other options out there to be researched as well such a blog hops (which I don’t know too much about personally). Look around and see what works for you.  While you’re at it, why not enter my own giveaway because hey, FREE BOOK!

About these ads

7 Responses »

  1. I did a give away on Goodreads for Being Human, had it last a month(ish) and had over 200 ppl add it to their to-read list and 1000 entries in the give away. So yeah, that’s definitely worth doing in hopes that later that translates into good reviews from the winners and buyers from the people who didn’t win.

  2. Pingback: Kindlegraph! Digital Book Signing « ImaginePublicity

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
http://keystrokesandwordcounts.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/adventures-in-promoland-giveaways/
keystrokesandwordcounts.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-20
72189
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FAI3F6W7RPS25INWYPJCPVLYPKLX66FH
<urn:uuid:51f5367d-ead5-4f15-882f-138fc30713a0>
2013-05-22T18:49:13Z
76.74.254.123
sha1:H45ITOZT3V6FQI664IYA62EFPPG3MBJ7
<urn:uuid:006a365a-9031-40df-bd8a-6f4b7e8d0a9c>
http://keystrokesandwordcounts.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/adventures-in-promoland-giveaways/
response
<urn:uuid:47a1c6a3-209f-49fd-a13f-9ea0c2f77f66>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-20
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf