Promotion and Marketing

I recently tried an Amazon Giveaway for my debut novel, Divine Prey.

Amazon Giveaways are essentially a way to promote something to Amazon customers, with the goal of increasing either awareness or the sales for your product. In short, you get to put it in front of a lot of people, and hopefully that translates to more sales.

Unfortunately, it’s only open to people with a US postal address, limiting the potential audience and value of the giveaway.

Amazon claim the Giveaway is free, and while on the surface that’s correct, it’s not exactly true. While using the Giveaway feature is free, that’s it as far as their generosity goes. It still costs in products and postage, and the costs can be considerable, depending on what you’re giving away.

In my case, I gave away two paperback books. To make this happen, I had to purchase my own books off Amazon at full retail price, and pay for all shipping and taxes on top of that.

So far, these books haven’t turned up on my Amazon book reports as sales figures or anywhere else, so I don’t even get a small bump in ‘sales’ figures unless there’s some sort of a delay.

Here’s the overall results of the Amazon Giveaway:

So how does this stack up in terms of value?

I noticed absolutely no change in sales figures during or after the Amazon Giveaway, though there was a slight change in page reads (very slight). I have no way to tell if that was due to the Giveaway, or Amazon ads, or something else.

In marketing terms, it put the book in front of a couple of thousand people, half of which were interested enough to enter the giveaway, and 62 interested enough to actually click through to the book’s page. No additional sales though – they were probably all hoping to win or just after a freebie because it’s easy to enter.

Maybe now that the giveaway has been finalised some people might return and buy the book (I doubt it without an additional prompt). The problem is, unless you pay for the Amazon Giveaway premium package (around US$600-ish) you can’t send a follow-up email or anything else to encourage people to come back and buy the book.

I doubt anyone beyond the winners were even notified.

It’s also up to you to promote and advertise the giveaway on social media and other places. Otherwise, it merely appears on the Amazon Giveaway page. I mentioned it in a few Google Plus groups, and Twitter. Maybe Facebook – can’t remember. I probably should have documented it.

To get an Amazon Giveaway up and running, you need to navigate to the bottom of your book’s page, and select the giveaway option:

And then you add information, like your name, a photo of you, and how many items you want to give away. This is a screenshot setting up a new giveaway using the same details as before:

In this case, I’ve chosen to give away 2 paperback books, added my name and photo, and chosen the Sweepstakes option. Sweepstakes mean that at the end of the giveaway, Amazon will randomly select people from all entrants to receive the prize – as many as you’re giving away.

The other options are fairly self-explanatory:

• Random Instant Win
• Lucky Number Instant Win
• First-come, First-served.

Whatever option you choose probably depends on how many copies of your book you can afford to give away. I couldn’t find an option to give away the eBook version, though I saw a few on the Giveaways page.

Next, and this is the really important part, you need to select the conditions for entry. I chose to add no barriers to entry the first time, as I wanted to get the book in front of as many people as possible while also setting up a baseline for comparison.

This time, I’m adding a very simple condition – entrants need to follow my amazon author profile. Hopefully that sorts out the tyre kickers from the genuinely interested crowd.

Alternatively, if you’ve got a book trailer, you could try one of the video options. You can only choose one option though.

After that, you need to make it discoverable.

I don’t see any value in making it a private giveaway unless you’re a big brand giving products away to a specific group (for example, people at a convention your sponsoring). Even then, there’s probably a lot of cheaper ways to go about it.

Regardless, I want my giveaway to be as open as possible in order to reach more people.

And here’s how your entry will look:

And finally, go through a couple of screens where Amazon generously offers to give you a $10 discount when you open an Amazon credit card with them, you pay the costs of products and postage, and whalah!, your Amazon Giveaway begins.

The giveaway goes live.

I don’t know how this Amazon Giveaway will go considering I’ve added a condition for entry (follow my Amazon author page), but at least now I’ve got a baseline to compare it with.

The real question is, is it worth the money? To be worth it, these giveaways would need to return my costs at a minimum, preferably several times over, and so far the first one is a long way from doing either.

I doubt the second one will improve on that, to be honest.

Still, there are other benefits, mostly via exposure to a group of people I probably wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise, and a legitimate way to promote my book without looking like a twat.

How valuable is that? Who knows? It’s essentially traditional marketing in some ways, and to be honest, traditional marketing doesn’t really work very well unless you’ve got a big bucket of money to throw at it – and even then, it’s difficult to tell.

What does work though is word of mouth, and to a lesser extent reviews.

The giveaway contributes to that – at least via spreading the word.

If you’ve found this post interesting or helpful, it’d be great if you could spread the word about it or link to it. Every little bit helps. Thanks.

Here’s the link to the Amazon Giveaway: https://www.amazon.com/ga/p/bec9f59640723f51#ts-ln

For a long time I struggled to see the value of writing short stories.

While they’re fun to write, help provide ‘instant’ gratification, and have a chance of providing ‘street cred’ among the writing community, they’re probably not going to do much for your finances or writing career unless you’re winning competitions and in a situation to take advantage of the kudos (ie, you’ve got a couple of really good novels up your sleeve).

So my question has always been, are they worth the time and effort?

For example, you could, write 20 short stories at 5000 words each, spend a significant amount of time to edit and polish them, and perhaps you’d end up with a couple that were good enough to sell for coffee money or a copy of an anthology.

The reward? A better writing skill set and a pat on the back, and perhaps an opportunity to show off something else you’ve done.

Alternatively, you could write a novel of 100,000 words, spend the same amount of time editing and polishing it as you would 20 short stories, and have a novel you could shop around to agents and publishers, or publish yourself.

The reward: a novel you could perhaps have some significant success with, a better writing skill set, and a pat on the back.

Either way, the investment in time and effort is the same, and you’d learn a lot about the craft of writing.

Because of that, I’d suggest you do both.

That assumes you have longer term goals for your writing career. I.e., you’d like to make enough money to become a full-time writer. Maximise your opportunities.

Personally, I think the opportunities that short stories represent to help you promote your novels is their most valuable aspect. Even if you never win a competition or struggle to get them published, you can put always the better ones up on Amazon as ‘writing samples’, teasers designed to draw people to your other works.

If you do that, put whatever price you like on them as they’re unlikely to make you any money either way, but use the opportunities Amazon provides for promotion – take advantage of all your free days, and mention those days when your stories are free on your blog, you social media outlets, and wherever else you believe is appropriate.

You might even make a little coffee money from them from Kindle Unlimited.

But don’t stop there:

• Somewhere in the text (beginning or end of the short story), make sure you mention your other short stories.
• Put a few chapters of the novel you want to promote at the back of each short story.

You never know what might happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe great things.

Either way, they’re an opportunity you can take advantage of.

And in the spirit of taking advantage of such opportunities, two of my short stories are coming up for free days:

• Any Job in a Haze: 16-20 April
• Promises Promises: 30 April – 4 May

Get them while they’re free, see what I did, and let me know if you think this is a good strategy or not (and if the answer’s yes, make sure you do it yourself!).

Let me know your thoughts, or otherwise how it goes for you in the comments section.