Books (Photo credit: phatcontroller)
On May 3, on Goodreads, I offered nine free signed paperback copies of my novel A Bridge to Treachery to anyone who wanted to read it. My motivation was to increase reader exposure to the book in hopes that this would result in increased sales and reviews. The offer was good until June 3. The cost to me was about $15 per book including shipping. I also advertised on GR at a total cost of about $65. The offer resulted in 650 readers indicating that they would take me up on it. About 60 readers added “Treachery” to their “to read shelf”. I shipped the books to the “winners” of the GR random selection of 9 readers out of the 650 interested on June 4. So far, I have had one of the lucky nine post a review, and one reader from among the unlucky post a rating on GR. There is some indication that the Kindle Edition of the book got a small sales bump at Amazon, but there have been no reviews there that I can attribute to the giveaway. I have no idea how much time I should allow before I can realistically expect to get more reviews. I will see if sales of the paperback edition got a bump when I get my next quarterly royalty check from Brighton Publishing LLC.
That’s a real interesting exercise in marketing. I found when I was in business that marketing was almost intuitive along with following stats. You have to be in it for the long haul. Frustrating not to know when you’ve forked out a chunk of change though. I get the sense you were disappointed with the response – it’s so hard for people to follow through – not sure why, but it’s a fact. Maybe other writer bloggers might have more of a sense than I do. I find a lot of support in the LinkIn bloggers groups myself. BTW if you come to my site again, be sure to leave a link to your blog through commentluv at the bottom of the comment box. Then everyone can easily see your blog. Works well for me, tho’ I think it’s only a wordpress plug-in.
With this post I was hoping to add to the conversation about Goodreads giveaways. I’ve taken the attitude that I would attempt the giveaway strategy and observe what happens. I think the number of people who put themself in the running for my free paperback is about average for these giveaways when it is limited to those in the US. While the number is mildly interesting as an indicator of the reach of GR in the reading community, it is otherwise mostly meaningless since it seems to be populated with readers who habitually sign on to giveaways, and do it indiscriminately. At first I was thinking it represented readers who had made some kind of qualitative judgment about the book, and that thought was heartening, but now I’m of a mind that most of the “takers” just click on the offer without much thought about the book at all. It’s not really disappointing. It’s just a fact. Does it justify the strategy? Maybe a little. It increased exposure to some extent.