Summary: GoodReads giveaways, one of the most cost-effective book promotion tactics, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1108-goodreads-introduces-new-u-s-giveaways-program-a-more-powerful-book-mar">are changing</a>. Here’s everything you need to know about giving away books on GoodReads.<br> Introduction<br> TLDR:<br> <br> * Jim is out sick today.<br> * We don’t talk about a lot of news on this show.<br> * Try to focus on evergreen topics<br> * GoodReads is making a major change you need to know about.<br> * Specifically, GoodReads is changing how giveaways work.<br> <br> I’m Thomas Umstattd Jr., and James L. Rubart, who normally joins me on the show, is out sick today, so I am going solo. So we’re hoping that Jim feels better.<br> But what we’re going to talk about today —or what I’m going to talk about– is Goodreads giveaways. There’s been a huge change in how Goodreads works. Now generally we try to focus on evergreen topics on the show. We don’t like to cover current news. There’s some really good podcasts that do that, like the <a href="http://sellmorebooksshow.com/">Sell More Books Show</a> is mostly covering brand new news. So we like to cover marketing principles that don’t change quickly. But with Goodreads, this change is so important I feel like we’ve got to cover it.<br> Background<br> TLDR:<br> <br> * Back in episodes <a href="http://www.novelmarketing.com/12/">12</a> and <a href="http://www.novelmarketing.com/14/">14</a> we talked about how to use GoodReads to market your book.<br> * One of the most effective techniques back then was to give books away for free.<br> * GoodReads makes is easy to host a giveaway and you get lots of benefits from the publicity.<br> * Wasn’t free, you had to ship a physical book, which typically cost $5-$10 per book for printing and shipping. So if you give away 10 books it is $50 to $100 to host a giveaway.<br> * We recommend giving away one book at a time which was a great deal in terms of cost per impression. The cost of the giveaway was no more than $10 and you got a lot of attention for that $10.<br> <br> So a little bit of background. Back in Episodes 12 and 14 we talk about how to use Goodreads to market your book. We had Randy Ingermanson on, and one of the techniques that we talked about was giving away your book for free.<br> Randy did some experiments, and we found that giving away just one book over and over again was quite effective. So it wasn’t free to give away a book; you had to send a physical book to the winner of the contest that Goodreads hosted for you. But that would cost five to ten dollars per book depending on how much your printing and shipping was to that person. If you gave away 10 books, it was a bit pricey, it’s fifty to a hundred bucks, but if you gave away just one book, which we found was the best bang for the buck, it was only 10 bucks to host a giveaway. So it was a pretty good deal if you are marketing your book on a budget.<br> The problem:<br> The problem though was that it was such a good technique, everyone started doing it. So people didn’t just hear about it from the Novel Marketing podcast, they also heard about it other places.<br> And it’s gotten so crowded. I checked yesterday: there are 3000 books being given away. 3000 different titles in the giveaway section, which is too many for readers to browse. So it’s a little bit overwhelming and the result is that it’s not as effective as it used to be.<br> What is Changing:<br> TLDR:<br> <br> * <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/1108-goodreads-introduces-new-u-s-giveaways-program-a-more-powerful-book-mar">Indie Authors in KDP will be able to give away ebook</a> copies for the first time.<br> * Traditional publishers got this a while back and there was a lot of complaining that this was not fair.<br>
