Why You Should Run a Goodreads Giveaway
As an author you'll no doubt already understand the importance of promotion in making your book a success.
While traditionally published authors usually have the luxury of an agent and publishing house to handle the heavy lifting of a marketing campaign, self published authors must take the lead in running their own campaign, getting the word out to potential fans and influential reviewers.
It can be a hard slog, and many writers find promotion even harder than writing, but if you want to succeed you'll need to be aggressive in your promotion.
Fortunately, in this connected age we no longer need face the horrors of an extended book tour to find our audience.
Sites such as Goodreads dot com bring our readers to us, and by leveraging the power of the Internet we can find an audience without leaving the comfort of our homes.
Perhaps one of the most powerful promotional tools available to the exposure-hungry author today is the Goodreads giveaway.
The site, a social network that operates much like a book club with millions of members, offers authors the chance to get their book in front of countless potential readers, and by offering a giveaway you can not only generate interest in your latest book but also generate immediate sales and reviews.
At its heart, a Goodreads giveaway is a competition.
As an author you will offer a limited number of free copies of your work and set a deadline on the giveaway.
In that time any Goodreads member will be able to enter the contest, and at the end the winners will be selected by Goodreads.
Edit-To use Goodreads for a giveaway, you need to have a physical book to giveaway, not a digital one.
You can use Createspace to create a physical copy of your book.
It's inexpensive and cost effective.
So, how can a Goodreads giveaway help you promote your work? Why is it such a powerful promotional tool, and how can you make the most of it? 1.
Awareness Plain and simple, a Goodreads giveaway will get your name out there to your target audience.
Whether you offer a single free copy or 100 in your giveaway, an average of 60 entrants (according to Goodreads statistics) will add your book to their 'to-read' list.
This is, of course, no guarantee that they will actually read it, but all publicity is good publicity.
The more books you give away, the more people will add it to their to-read list.
According to Patrick Brown of Goodreads the conversion rate is 8% of entrants, so it 10,000 people enter your contest you might expect 800 of them to decide to read your book, win or lose.
2.
Reviews On average, 45% of giveaway winners will go on to review your book.
While this may not sound like a great return, the truth is very different.
One in five Goodreads members runs their own book blog, so not only will each review be seen by each of the reviewer's Goodreads friends, there's also a very good chance it will be published on a popular blog, spreading the word even further.
Goodreads members who have run successful giveaways recommend that authors offer as many free copies as they can afford.
They advise that the contest should run for a good length of time (several weeks to a month), and that during that time the author throws him or herself into promotion to spread the word about the giveaway.
Since a highly successful contest could generate interest from thousands of potential readers, getting it right could be the silver bullet that sends your book to the top of the bestseller list.
While traditionally published authors usually have the luxury of an agent and publishing house to handle the heavy lifting of a marketing campaign, self published authors must take the lead in running their own campaign, getting the word out to potential fans and influential reviewers.
It can be a hard slog, and many writers find promotion even harder than writing, but if you want to succeed you'll need to be aggressive in your promotion.
Fortunately, in this connected age we no longer need face the horrors of an extended book tour to find our audience.
Sites such as Goodreads dot com bring our readers to us, and by leveraging the power of the Internet we can find an audience without leaving the comfort of our homes.
Perhaps one of the most powerful promotional tools available to the exposure-hungry author today is the Goodreads giveaway.
The site, a social network that operates much like a book club with millions of members, offers authors the chance to get their book in front of countless potential readers, and by offering a giveaway you can not only generate interest in your latest book but also generate immediate sales and reviews.
At its heart, a Goodreads giveaway is a competition.
As an author you will offer a limited number of free copies of your work and set a deadline on the giveaway.
In that time any Goodreads member will be able to enter the contest, and at the end the winners will be selected by Goodreads.
Edit-To use Goodreads for a giveaway, you need to have a physical book to giveaway, not a digital one.
You can use Createspace to create a physical copy of your book.
It's inexpensive and cost effective.
So, how can a Goodreads giveaway help you promote your work? Why is it such a powerful promotional tool, and how can you make the most of it? 1.
Awareness Plain and simple, a Goodreads giveaway will get your name out there to your target audience.
Whether you offer a single free copy or 100 in your giveaway, an average of 60 entrants (according to Goodreads statistics) will add your book to their 'to-read' list.
This is, of course, no guarantee that they will actually read it, but all publicity is good publicity.
The more books you give away, the more people will add it to their to-read list.
According to Patrick Brown of Goodreads the conversion rate is 8% of entrants, so it 10,000 people enter your contest you might expect 800 of them to decide to read your book, win or lose.
2.
Reviews On average, 45% of giveaway winners will go on to review your book.
While this may not sound like a great return, the truth is very different.
One in five Goodreads members runs their own book blog, so not only will each review be seen by each of the reviewer's Goodreads friends, there's also a very good chance it will be published on a popular blog, spreading the word even further.
Goodreads members who have run successful giveaways recommend that authors offer as many free copies as they can afford.
They advise that the contest should run for a good length of time (several weeks to a month), and that during that time the author throws him or herself into promotion to spread the word about the giveaway.
Since a highly successful contest could generate interest from thousands of potential readers, getting it right could be the silver bullet that sends your book to the top of the bestseller list.
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