Amazon Giveaways for your Books
For $14.95, I’m pretty much game to try anything.
Are Amazon Giveaways for your Books the path to guaranteed stardom and endless riches?
They sure make it easy to set it up.
Well, probably not, but it’s worth at least dabbling.
I readily admit that I went for the Shiny Object today as I was somewhere on an Amazon page (maybe my own book’s page, I don’t even remember) and saw this option to create a giveaway. I clicked.
Probably the most important question you answer is the part about what is your requirement to enter the contest. I can’t scroll back to the page, but it was something like:
- Follow you on Amazon,
- Follow you on Twitter,
- Post a certain Tweet,
- Watch a video,
- Respond to a poll,
- Nothing (no requirement).
I chose the following on Twitter only because then I figured I could see who these people were. Although I like the Amazon author follow, I’m pretty sure they are only contacted if I publish a new book–and I don’t see who they are. I also didn’t have a video or poll ready.
Who knows, maybe they will just be people who search for anything free or giveaways and sign up to see what they get no matter what it is.
We’ll see. Following my own “Let’s see what happens.” strategy, we’ll see if this was worth the $14.95. Hey, at least I’m giving away something I want to give away!
Some notes. You could also choose what to give away, how many of them (I chose 5 of my books x $2.99 = $14.95 total cost to me). You could also choose among sweepstakes, a random selection, and a few other versions. I didn’t really know which was best. I just picked one.
A few screenshots to show you what’s happened so far.
We’ll see if these new followers are “valuable” at all.
A bunch of people signed up … but I don’t really know where they came from.
24 hours later …
sdf I don’t really know where they’re coming from, but they’re coming. Hmm.
Somehow 78 people have entered my giveaway. I don’t know who they are know anything about them. Does this help?
I would say it doesn’t hurt.
But does it help? I don’t know. 78 people at least caught the name of my book and, if they spent all of 3 seconds to read what the giveaway was, maybe they saw it was a book. They then had to follow my Twitter handle to claim their spot in the sweepstakes.
I’m pretty sure this falls into the “We’ll see what happens.” category of book marketing.
It didn’t cost me much time or energy and the outcome is pretty much only good.
We’ll see!
