A few weeks ago, I blogged on giveaways on Amazon and Goodreads. For us, Goodreads was an ongoing strategy, but Amazon was completely new. Pamela Fagan Hutchins tried it for her mystery Heaven to Betsy.
The promo ran for one week, which was the set period and not something that could be changed. That matches the time periods Pamela uses on Goodreads, though, so it was a good comparative.
Pamela gave away 20 books and had 2000 people enter. The readers received a paperback sent directly by Amazon, so while it wasn’t signed, Amazon handled fulfillment. The cost of the books to Pamela was full price, unlike when she does Goodreads giveaways and is able to buy at wholesale prices. So while she spent more, she did less work.
The 2000+ entrants was two times as many as Pamela generally gets on Goodreads. However, she gave away twice as many books. She ran a giveaway where she gave away one book for each hundredth entrant. When she does it again, she plans to make it every 200 to 300 entrants, and experiment with the parameters.
Pamela had hoped to give away 30 books and to get 3000 entrants. However, it did not appear that Amazon picked the giveaway for promotion, which is what it would have taken to get that many people to enter. Plus, entrants had to follow her on Twitter, and that condition was a bar from some. An Amazon author page follow would be a much better condition, in our opinion, especially given Amazon’s recent move into letting authors craft messages about their new releases for Amazon to send to their followers.
The biggest benefit by far of the Amazon giveaway was Pamela’s ability to send custom 140-character messages to the winners and to the losers. It allowed her to let them all know that the first novel in her interrelated series was always free in e-book form, as well as provided the chance for her to ask for honest reviews. With Goodreads giveaways, she is able to include a message to the winners in book shipments, but to send messages to the authors gets kind of spammy as they aren’t necessarily fans or friends, plus they would have to be done one by one, a laborious and time consuming process.
For the benefit of being able to send these messages, Pamela felt that the Amazon giveaway is the better deal, especially as she experiments with the parameters of the giveaway itself, even though it is a little more costly. She does plan to continue Goodreads giveaways, though, as they drive reviews and rankings on Goodreads where book influencers hang out.
Has anyone had good experiences with either type of giveaway? If so, we’d love to hear about them in the contents.
Eric