Giveaways and Your Book Marketing

In the previous days I have come across the same topic several times. Then I thought that maybe you have not heard of it yet so decided to let you know about this. What I am talking is Amazon Giveaways. Amazon let’s you create and promote a giveaway of items that are sold there. The interesting part of this for us is that we can now create kindle ebook giveaways. 

What many authors did before was organizing book giveaways - mainly on Goodreads. Unfortunately you could give aways only paperbacks. I tried a giveaway of my first novel Highfall on Goodreads and although it did bring visibility to my book it did not impact the sales figure.

So why is Amazon giveaway different you may think. Well before I dive into this, I have to make a disclaimer. It seems like the Amazon giveaway can organize only the US residents, so if you have amazon.com account but no US address linked to your account then you won’t be able to make it… Hopefully they will roll over to the other markets soon too. The good news though is that you don’t have to be in KDP Select to be able to organize giveaways and of course giving away ebooks is more affordable and there are no shipping charges involved obviously.

Ok now let’s see why would you as an author possibly want to make an Amazon giveaway.

The first obvious reason, of course is get your book front of more people. And since those who have already purchased your book are not eligible for your giveaway you will end up will be reaching new potential readers.

The second good thing is that all the participants, who have not won the giveaway get the free sample of your book. Which means that the potential new readers will probably get the taste of your writing style.

Another good thing is that when you organize your book’s Amazon giveaway you can choose chose an option where in order to participate people have to follow you on your Amazon’s author page. This means that whenever you have a new book out all who follow will be notified. It is not as good as having them on your e mail list of course, but it is most probably the closest thing you can get with Amazon.

To wrap this topic up I’ll just need to say that your giveaways can last up to 30 days, ebooks purchased for the giveaway are non-refundable and you can check there is a Twitter hashtag #AmazonGiveaways you can follow. And maybe the best part of it all is that those who have tried the Amazon giveaways tell that it impacts book’s sales ranking.

Ok, that was it about the Amazon.

Now I will share my ideas about giveaways in general.

I personally feel uncomfortable, when things are not under my control. That is why strategies, which rely on specific social media channel, or only one platform, or an audience, which is not mine are not my favorite. I mean what if something happens to Facebook one day? Where do I find all those people who liked my page… You see what I mean right?

That is why I prefer to put time and effort bringing my audience to my place, that is my website and my e mail list. Are you already there btw? If no check out www.anialexander.com

Having that said I prefer to use KingSumo’s giveaway plugin for Wordpress. The giveaway is done so that it increases participant’s chances to win when they share your contest like crazy and therefore it easily goes viral. But that is just the bonus. The best thing is that you are getting the list of all participant’s emails, which you can later use. I have used this only twice for now, but have seen great results with both giveaways.

The things is… if you are unknown writer like me, most probably people will not be interesting in your book’s giveaway, because they have not read you yet and they have not heard your name either, right?

Yup…

But what you can do is - choose several bestseller’s in your genre or around your book’s topic and have a bundle of those books with yours inside as a giveaway. Like that you will gain a list of people, who are interested in your genre or topic and are your potential readers. And even if they don’t read your book (although part of them will check it out I think) you will still have their names and email address.