I previously did a post about giveaway prizes and I wanted to do more posts about giveaways, so for today’s topic I decided to talk about some of the reasons why you might want to run a giveaway.
Reasons for running a giveaway
- Gather followers, subscribers or people adding the book to their to-read list. Giveaways are a great way to get more social media followers, newsletter subscribers, have people post about your book on social media or add your book to their to-read list on Goodreads. You can set up most giveaways to do multiple or all of these depending on what your goal is.
- Get information or opinions. You can do giveaways as a means of collection information or opinions from your fans and followers. Often the way I see authors handle this is by running a poll or survey and people who fill out the survey or reply are entered into the giveaway. This is a great way to collect information or opinions from your followers and newsletter subscribers.
- As a thank you. A giveaway is a great way to thank people. Examples are thanking your ARC team, people who helped promote your book, filled out a form or poll, shared a discount or opened, clicked or replied to one of your newsletters.
- To celebrate. A giveaway can be a great way to celebrate a book launch, hitting a milestone, your author anniversary etc.
- For fun. I think giveaways can be fun to run and running a giveaway for fun or because you want to is a valid reason as well.
- To reach new readers. Giveaways are exciting and people love winning, it’s for that reason they are a great way to reach new readers who might not have heard from you otherwise. A lot of giveaways also have ways for people to spread the word about it or people who can share your giveaway, which causes it to reach more people. And even if these new possible readers don’t win they might become a new reader for you now that they heard of you and your book(s).
- More attention for a book, author, launch or discount. Around important moments like a book launch or discount is a good time to run a giveaway. Or if you don’t have a launch or discount, running a giveaway to pull more attention to you as an author and your books without a launch or discount to time it around work too. Moments were you want more attention or eyes to something can be a good moment for a giveaway.
- Extra stock or swag. If you have too much physical copies of a book in your house, old cover editions, ordered too much swag etc this can be a great reason to do a giveaway for these. It removes them from your house and you can do a giveaway and make someone else happy at the same time.
- Randomly. I don’t think there is a bad timing for a giveaway and just because is as good as reason as any.
I often recommend authors to run a giveaway during a blog tour for multiple of these reasons, like more attention to the tour and book, thank the tour hosts and gather subscribers and followers. In a future post I plan to talk about how to run a giveaway.
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