Goodreads Giveaways

Any author, especially those of us doing our own publishing and/or own marketing, will tell you what a struggle it is to get our work into the hands of new readers and what a joy it is when that finally happens. We love the people who already know about us, or read us, but are they buying books? Are they clicking on our books to put them into those shopping carts and spend their hard earned money on them? Or are they the friends and family we just send free copies to because it's no use those copies taking up space in our own cupboards at home? (Granted - with print-on-demand books now available, we no longer have to deal with a ton books stored in the garage.)

Some of the books in my cupboard.

There is always a fleeting hope that our friends and family will help us hawk our books out into the world and that they will somehow be bought by someone who will tell all their friends and then we'll be cooking with gas cuz they'll buy all our books! Yeah, baby! And then maybe Oprah!

But the reality is that our friends and family have lives of their own, possibly books of their own, and they may tell a few people, but mostly our books will sit at the bottom of the Amazon sales list and will be returned by the independent books stores we send them out to.

The point is, after we've saturated our captive audience of friends and family with the marketing of our books, we need to somehow reach past that boundary to new readers; it is we the writers who are the ones responsible for the hawking of said books and for trying to reach those new readers.

So, it was with great interest when I ran into the Goodreads Giveaways program a couple of months ago (as a reader this means you can get free copies of books if you go through the list and find books you like; as a writer this means sign your books up!).

Any author or publisher can sign their recently published book (within the last six months) up for the program. Provide the book description, copy of the cover, ISBN, etc., as well as how many copies you are willing to give away (and remember to include how much that will be in postage when budgeting for yourself), and time limit (from a few days to a few weeks) for the giveaway.

After an approval process, Goodreads places your book on a list of books that Goodreads readers can go through and sign up for books they would be interested in receiving for free. At the end of your own self-appointed time limit, Goodreads uses their own system to choose the appropriate number of people to receive your free copies. You get their names and addresses (with the understanding that you will not be using that info for nefarious purposes) and they get your books (with the understanding that after reading your books they will post a review).

You can see how many people signed up for my books, and I was only giving five away.

So, looking at the above pic you can see that about 300 people who would not otherwise have been exposed to my book, saw it and clicked on it and liked it enough to sign up for a free copy. And currently five copies of each book are winging their way to people completely outside my current circle of influence. Hopefully, I've broken past that boundary and into a new set of people who will (again hopefully) enjoy my book enough to spend the time to write a positive review. And maybe their friends will trust that review enough to buy a copy, and they'll tell two friends, and so on (as the old commercial says).

I'm crossing my fingers.