Top Book Giveaway Platforms and Tips to Leverage Them for Book Promotion Success

By Damyanti Biswas

As an author, whether you are trad or self-published, the bulk of book promotion now falls on your shoulders.

One aspect of book promotion is a giveaway. A giveaway tends to be popular because it lets readers have a shot at snagging a book for free, or even win some additional swag. Not necessarily because most readers cannot buy books or depend on free books for their reading: a giveaway usually turns into a community event, bringing readers together while a book is given away.

The more entertaining a giveaway, higher its chances of being successful. Yes, giving away a kindle or expensive customized swag like tote bags, t-shirts, mugs, candles etc can be the ticket to drawing a larger audience. Big publishers give away such items for their lead titles.

I have found though that it is possible to get readers excited about far lesser priced items that suit a typical author’s budget.

 The ad copy you write in order to announce a giveaway or the video you use, can often pique a reader’s interest. Giveaways also tend to be platform-specific and what works for one platform may not necessarily work for another.

With the information below, I have tried to collate giveaway ideas on various platforms, and what you can do to promote them better. Here are a few platforms on which to do giveaways:

Goodreads:

Goodreads isn’t the world’s best-run site, but it IS a behemoth. Readers still flock there, and entering your book for a giveaway will attract a lot of readers. You can give away kindle or paperbacks, and the fees are steep.

My publisher invests in the giveaway, and every time someone enters, it puts the book on the Want to read list of the entrant. Their followers are notified, and if those followers trust the entrant’s opinion, they might add your book to their Want-to-Reads. This happened with my book The Blue Bar, and I did see a direct correlation between pre-order numbers and want-to-reads.

Storygraph:

If the Goodreads giveaways look like too big an investment, try . It is a smaller but better run site and more readers are flocking to it each day. The giveaways are cheaper, but they also draw a smaller audience. I plan to experiment with this platform  soon but have heard good results from author friends who have tried it.

Instagram:

On Instagram, I've had the best results with book giveaways when a bookstagrammer hosts it instead of me. The hosts have a minimal investment in terms of just creating a graphic and making a post, and the giveaway usually asks for a Follow for them. I take care of the shipping costs and the ARC. It doesn’t directly lead to higher sales but it increases the visibility of the book cover. I also use it to thank the authors who have been kind enough to blurb my book. In that case I ask for a Follow for the host , for me, and the wonderful author who has blurbed my book.

This is simpler for me because my publisher puts my ARC on Netgalley, and also sends out physical ARCs. If you have your book on a site like Book Funnel, it is possible to give away an E-copy and thus reduce the investment.

Bookstagrammers who like your work can be a very supportive community: all you have to do is interact with them professionally over a longer period and genuinely engage with their posts. So many from my bookstagram family have helped me with cover reveals and reviews for the Blue Mumbai books. They know that their relationship with me will remain unaffected whether their review is positive or not.

Facebook:

On Facebook, giveaways work best in readers’ groups. Not many  such groups allow giveaways by authors but the few that do are very supportive and helpful. I've had many of the readers in these groups become super fans who have followed me all across my social media and reviewed all my books. Depending on your genre, here are a few groups that you can explore: Tattered Page Book Club, Psychological Thriller readers, Psychological Thriller Authors and Readers Unite, The Booklounge for Readers and Authors. If you develop relationships with the admins of these groups and interact throughout, you will receive amazing support.

Newsletter:

A newsletter outlasts all social media. If the growth of your newsletter is organic (like mine has been) even a small engaged audience can do wonders in terms of reviews and spreading the word. I try and do giveaways as often as possible on my newsletter in order to keep my audience more engaged and invested than ever.

Blog:

I don't run giveaways on my blog but some of the big reader blogs can be very effective in putting your book in front of a larger audience. Most of these blogs work with large publishers but if you make good relationships with other bloggers they might let you do a giveaway in conjunction with a guest posts. Research who the big readers in your genre are, and if they have established blogs. Some of them also tend to run very successful book clubs.

Twitter (X):

This platform is down but not yet out. Giveaways by book reviewers often gain hundreds of entries and put the book cover in front of a large audience. I'm giving away a few copies of my ARC's via book bloggers and the response has been tremendous.

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These are just a few of the platforms you can explore in order to spread the word about your book.

To make a book giveaway successful:

1.     Having a professionally made and striking book cover is absolutely crucial to the success of these giveaways. Readers do indeed judge a book by its cover.

2.     Don’t make the ask too big for the reader to enter the giveaway: usually a few likes, shares and follows do the trick. Make sure to ask an interaction question which will lead to more comments, or to tag/ post in stories to increase reach.

3.     The giveaways may not always lead to reviews—sometimes they do, at others they don’t, but having your book cover seen by a lot of readers is very worthwhile.

4.     Interaction with readers is key. A giveaway is not a make-it, shut-it, forget-it deal—readers are there as much for the interaction and engagement as they are for the freebie.

5.     Don’t lose sight of your voice as a writer—the more the reader sense your presence behind your giveaway posts, the more engaged they’re likely to be.

When a reader interacts with your book on one social media they are shown more advertisements of your book by Amazon and Facebook. If your publisher is placing ads, then doing these giveaways will reinforce these book covers in the minds of the reader.

Marketing wisdom says that a consumer needs to see a product at least seven times before making the decision to purchase it. Book giveaways help in providing that visibility and repetition to your book and your author brand.  All reviews are a bonus.

You can get quite creative about doing book giveaways on a smaller budget: all you'll need is to build your author platform: stable relationships with readers and book reviewers will create willingness to champion your book.

Have you participated in book giveaways on other platforms? What has experience with book giveaways been like?

 

BIO:

Damyanti is currently based in Singapore. Her short fiction has been published at Smokelong, Ambit, Litro, Puerto del Sol, among others, and she's the coeditor of The Forge literary magazine. 

 She's the author of You Beneath Your Skin, an Amazon-bestselling crime novel, which has been optioned for screens by Endemol Shine. Her next crime novel, The Blue Bar was published by Thomas & Mercer USA. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and Goodreads named it one of 2023's Most Anticipated Mysteries & Thrillers. The sequel, The Blue Monsoon, is out on 24^th Oct, 2023.

Her popular blog Daily (w)rite, where she speaks about the writing life and interviews publishing professionals turned 15 this year. Find out all about her and her books here.

ABOUT THE BLUE MONSOON:

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Seven Sizzling Tips to Write That Absolutely Killer First Chapter

By Damyanti Biswas

Irrespective of genre, writing the beginning of a novel is all about seducing the reader. In today’s world of easily available and multiple avenues of entertainment, a novel has to compete with far more than other novels.

You need a beginning that’ll snag the reader’s attention right off the bat.

As humans, we’re geared to find answers to questions and notice anything that is out of the ordinary. Without these two essential skills, we wouldn’t have lasted long in a pre-historic jungle. This is why stories hold our interest, why readers pick up stories to read.

Here’s how to hook their attention, and keep it:

1. Write a killer first line or paragraph.
That first line needs to lead into the second and the third.
You can either go with a big voice, active opening like: “Call me Ishmael.”
Or something off-kilter: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
You can also set the tone of the entire tale with the first paragraph:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

2. Give the Who, Why, What, Where, How.
A writing teacher I once learned from, said: While telling your story, imagine your reader has been in a coma, and that you have to orient them to what happened when they were unaware. Who are the characters? What do they want, what are they up to, and why? How do they achieve it? Where are they? Not in a journalistic fashion (though exceptions to this exist, depending on the voice of your narrator), but so that the reader is somewhat oriented in your world.
In my recent novel, THE BLUE BAR, I spend a lot of time making sure the reader sinks into the setting, all the while curious about this child-woman in a blue-sequinned saree, posing at a crowded railway station for the pleasure of a distant voyeur.

3. Raise story questions.
All novels begin with a story question that must be answered by the end of the novel. The reason beginnings are diabolically hard is because in some cases you need to write an entire draft before you know what the story is exactly about. A mystery doesn’t need to begin with murder in the first paragraph, nor a romance with a kiss in the first chapter. But most mysteries end with a dead body at the end of the first chapter.

4. Make the action and the setting vivid and clear.
If your reader is confused about what's happening right off the bat, or cannot figure out where they are, then it’s time to sit up and take notice. World-building is especially important in fantasy and sci-fi, because the world and its rules might be different than our own. You’ll want to balance this with action—even when showing the status quo, the reader will be more invested if the character overcomes some sort of challenge that presents his or her current situation, and gives enough of the character’s core to get the reader invested in it.

5. Ensure tension.
Irrespective of genre, what keeps the reader turning the pages is tension. The tension of the unknown. Something weird or slightly strange. Chemistry between characters.
Here are a few points to keep in mind to keep tension alive and kicking:
• You can have an intriguing opening, but not a puzzling one. Confusing your reader is a cardinal sin, and kills tension.
• Most good novels begin at a watershed juncture of the protagonist's life, just before everything is about to go wrong. Foreshadow that doom.
• Use all five senses on the page to give the reader a real, three-dimensional experience of the story universe.
• Make sure the action is choreographed right so that it’s clear and easy to follow. If your reader is lost, trying to figure out what happened, you haven’t done your job.
• Begin in the middle of an action--in medias res is always more intriguing than a long description of setting or character.

6. Make your character interesting.
Characterizing through action moves the plot forward--couple this with engaging the reader with the setting. This is tricky, but if you get all least two of the three going at the very outset, you'll have that hook right away. Of the three, the setting and character are crucial (for me). Once you give the reader an experience of the world they are in, and get them to care about your protagonist, they would automatically be invested in the plot.
In THE BLUE BAR, the reader knows a fait bit about Tara at the end of the first chapter and is (hopefully) keen to find out more.

7. Find a strong narrative voice.
This is the most elusive, yet the most crucial of them all. If the narrator has an engaging voice, readers would respond to it immediately. A voice gives the reader confidence they are in the hands of an assured storyteller. It’s a mixture of world-view, word choices, style, and the choice of the story that is being told. This comes with a lot of practice, and unless you’re a genius, will take a lot of rewrites. Make sure not a single superfluous word remains on your first page.

The beginning of novel is the setting up of a contract with your reader. The reader agrees to give their time to you, the writer, in exchange of being either educated, or entertained, or both.

A solid beginning of a novel sets up this contract, so you need to pay enough and more attention to get it as snappy as you can make it.

What do you think makes a great beginning to a novel? What’s your process for beginning your novel? Does your beginning stay intact through various drafts?

Damyanti Biswas lives in Singapore. Her short stories have been published in magazines in the US, UK, and Australia, and she helps edit the Forge Literary Magazine. Her debut crime novel You Beneath Your Skin has been optioned for screen by Endemol Shine, and her next, The Blue Bar, was published in January 2023 by Thomas & Mercer.

The Blue Bar by Damyanti Biswas
A serial killer. A missing dancer. A Mumbai inspector on their trail.
Cold-case murders in Mumbai are unearthing decades of dark secrets.
Dead or alive, he must find her. He can’t put the past to rest until he solves it.