Gifting Your Book For Beginners
Originally published at https://medium.com on December 11, 2019.
Happy Christmas in July! So authors, what do we think about gifting your books? Personally, I am not an independent author for the money (which I think is the case for many of us). Writing is my active hobby and more than cold, hard cash I am looking for reviews. In the release of Premonition, I gifted some of my coworkers and friends paperback copies. I also left a copy in the free library at my local Starbucks. I sent my book to bloggers and I ran a giveaway so readers can have an eBook version delivered to their Kindle on Black Friday. I am not above giving my book out for free if there’s a chance to build my audience.
Let’s breakdown gifting into three categories:
Listing Giveaways: If you don’t have your own website or a huge following on any channel to run your own giveaways, you have options. Goodreads has a wide community of readers and gives authors the ability to run giveaways of their book. While in the past it was free, now their giveaways come at a price. Full disclosure, the price is steep. However, for me, a pretty much nobody author, I was able to get close to 500 people interested in the giveaway after one month of promoting it. Running this type of giveaway does come with risks. Many times, you will run into “book collectors” who will join every giveaway, whether it’s in a genre they are interested in or not. They either will 1) never read your work or worse, 2) read it and leave a horrible review just because it’s not a genre they are into. You really list a giveaway at your own risk, but I have had some positive return. For me, I tend to get a 10% retention rate when I run this type of giveaway. 100 copies are given for free and about 10 readers will leave a rating for my book within the next three months. Goodreads gives you the list of winners’ names as well as sends them a reminder to rate your book a few weeks later which increases the chances a winner will actually read and rate your book.
Photo by Juliana Malta on Unsplash
Understandably, not everyone wants to pay to run a giveaway in the hopes of getting reviews. Alternatively, you can list your book for up to five free days a quarter if you are enrolled in KDP Select. Through Kindle Direct Publishing you can view how many downloads you received, but it’s harder to track and quantify if these downloads lead to reviews. When listing a free day, it’s helpful to blast any groups or communities you are in, to give them a heads up about the free book. It’s interesting to see how these free giveaways trend and what influencer may pick up your book unexpectedly. In 2017 I had a free giveaway for my first book, The Whispers of Shadows, and got over 1500 eBook downloads. I still do not know to this day what triggered that many downloads as the average for me usually lands at around 50–100 on any free giveaway day. My assumption is that there was a promotion from an influencer I wasn’t connected with.
Gifting to Friends: So a few things to keep in mind before you spend money on gifting your book to your peer group: Just because they are your friends doesn’t mean they are actually going to read your book. If they do, most aren’t going to read it in a timely manner. You don’t want to create an awkward situation in your peer group by pressuring people to read and review your stuff. When I gift someone my book, I put no obligation on them to actually read it. I personally don’t expect my friends to support my hobbies (maybe I grew up in a cynical way!) You might find those few super supportive friends and colleagues who will read it right away and THEN there’s no shame in asking them to leave a review. Unanimously what I discovered is whether my friends or colleagues actually like to read or not, people love getting packages in the mail! I had so many excited people out of state send me pictures of getting the book I sent them in the mail which made for a great post on Instagram. Speaking of, if who I sent the book to has a big social media follower, I do ask if they would be willing to post the gift on social with a hashtag I provide connected to my book. You can start creating some positive buzz around your work. Something else to keep in mind, when you ship things to people out of state (or out of country) think of the possibilities. You could be opening your work to a whole new network of readers who might stumble upon the book one day. Who knows what will happen to that book in five years after your friend moves out of her apartment and can’t remember where she packed a darn thing?
Gifting to Influencers: Many influencers (bloggers and professional reviewers) will ask for a paperback copy of your work, not a PDF or digital version. If you feel that they have the right amount of influence for your genre, then go for it. I will ship my book to influencers who are overseas if they have shown interest in reading it. This doesn’t mean that they will give you a good review simply because you gifted it to them. However, they will in most cases give you a fair review and let you know if they didn’t like the book and will not be leaving a review (instead of leaving a poor review). If an influencer likes your book, sometimes this opens up the opportunity to run a giveaway on their channels to their network. One helpful resource to find influencers is the Book Blogger List. You can segment influencers by your genre and start reaching out to them.
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