Today I want to talk about giveaways. Recently, one of my clients began planning a blog tour. She decided to make five stops where the blogger would either review her book, interview her, or she would be a guest blogger. Some of the blog hosts suggested that she participate in giveaways and she asked me what I thought.
It has been my experience that there’s more interaction at blog sites where there’s a book giveaway.
If visitors don’t leave a comment, you have no idea how many stopped by and read your review or blog post. And visitors aren’t apt to leave a comment unless they know the author, they are particularly taken by your book or the post, OR they have a chance to get something for FREE.
So what can you give away? I generally offer three of my Klepto Cat Mystery books on Kindle and, perhaps, a print copy. I specific that I’ll ship in the US only. When I don’t offer these books for free, there are very few comments left at the site. When I do, there are sometimes dozens more comments.
Amazon.com has a book giveaway program for authors. I know people who have gained tons of recognition through these giveaways. One author I know gave over 37,000 books away during one of these events. But I’m not sure it did him any good–in the present, anyway. This was his first and only book. I hope to do an Amazon giveaway–have a free-book day or two. But I have 5 books in the series. It makes more sense to give away book number one in hopes that readers will then purchase other books in the series.
Everyone loves a freebie. I saw people standing in long lines at a self-publishing company’s booth at a major book festival last Spring waiting to receive free books from authors they did not know. When we hand out little heart stickers from our booth that say “I love books,” we get visitors seeking us out in order to get one. And people will sign up at your website for freebies that you offer. What is the percentage of people who ultimately purchase a book or tell others about your book, is unknown. I guess the closest we can come to determining the success of offering your books free is by the number of people who sign up and, in the case of the Amazon free-book program, the number of future orders.
To learn more about my books for authors and my new fiction series, The Klepto Cat Mysteries, visit my websites at http://www.matilijparess.com and http://www.patriciafry.com
I offer a freeby at my Patricia Fry website.