5 Pros & 5 Cons of Book Giveaways for Authors

“Free will always benefit authors if they know how to use it…” – Penny Sansevieri, Author Marketing Experts

GoodReads is a superb channel for authors, regardless of whether you’re a newbie, a traditional published superstar or a self-published author. You can build your author platform, get recommendations for what to read from seasoned readers and simply chat with people who love books. It’s no wonder that it eclipses Facebook and Twitter in the eyes of writers and readers in terms of which social network they prefer to use.

There are a variety of great advantages to using GoodReads (and Millions Pens has covered them here), and one of them are by using giveaways. Many authors use giveaways as a pre-release tool to build anticipation for their novels, and it has paid off for many authors, both in the traditional and self-publishing worlds.

The big question for authors though is: Are giveaways going to lose me money? Artistic integrity is one thing, but every author wants to earn money from their novels, or it simply isn’t a sustainable practice. Here we will look at the pros and cons of both before coming to a conclusion as to whether they are a clever sales generator or essentially flushing money down the toilet…

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Five Superb Benefits of Giveaways for Self-Published Authors

1. A solid likelihood of a spike in sales – Giveaways are only for a period of time, they’re not forever. This means that the publicity and ranking you’ve earned from the giveaways will give your novel the momentum it needs when the price tag comes back and people are talking about your novel and reviewing it in a possible light. This could lead to a spike in sales, and help to grow your readership. This is one of the main reasons that giveaways are so popular, it’s the aftermath of the offer that sets you up for later.

2. Introducing you and your writing to a new audience of readers in your genre – There are a ridiculous amount of books and eBooks out there, and if you’re a debutant or inexperienced author without a massive social media following, you have to look for ways to find your target audience. Giveaways are an opportunity to do just that.

3. Building Loyalty with your readers – Those folks who download your book on a giveaway may never read it. But if they do, and they enjoy it, they’re likely to see what you do next. How many times have we done that as readers?

4. Giving value for money (or lack of) to your readers – One way of looking at giveaways is that you are essentially saying “Hey! Check me out!” to readers who may not know who you are, and taking the decision of whether they pay for your book out of their hands.

5. Forward thinking – You’re setting your career up for the long term by taking a hit on sales short term. Your next book could potentially become a big hit due to a percentage of those readers who caught your last book on a freebie subscribing to your blog, following you on Twitter or Liking your Facebook page in anticipation of your next novel hitting the Kindle.

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Five Drawbacks of Giveaways for Self-Published Authors

1. There are no guarantees – either in an increase of sales or reader loyalty, and this can often scare off self-publishing authors, particularly ones who don’t have a ready-made following on social media, Amazon and co. If you’re going to give something away for free, you want some kind of compensation – or promise – of something good coming out of the exercise. This simply isn’t there, you have to take the chance and hope it pays off or move on.

2. Eyebrows may raise – The readers may say “Why do you need to give the book away for free? Is the quality not there?” Let’s not forget: Readers still have to take time out of their lives to read your books, whether they’ve paid for them or not. Therefore they might rather pay for what they perceive to be guaranteed quality rather than take a freebie that might not be good. To counter this, make your book look and read like the great piece of work you know it to be. The reviews should speak for themselves and take those eyebrows back to their normal position.

3. If you haven’t got a ready-made audience, you could get lost in the crowd. The marketplace is a cramped space as self-published novelists know. The authors with a larger fan base could be more likely to reap the bigger rewards from a giveaway, as they can get the news to their readers instantly.

4. The financial hit – First-time novelists may not have the funds to create a follow-up with a lack of royalties from sales of their debut novel, thus viewing giveaways as commercial suicide

5. The psychological effect – It has the potential to be demoralising for authors who may question their worth as a result of a low download count or simply because they are having to give their book away for free to make an impact on their market and find readers.

Read more:

• Opinion: The Value of Free eBooks – by Jan Ruth

• 5 Ways Writers Can Get the Most Out of GoodReads

• How to Run a GoodReads Giveaway with Maximum Results – 11 Tips We Know You’ll Need

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Conclusion

There are undoubtedly authors who are going to benefit more from giveaways than others, including ones who already have a profile and platform from which to work from – including indie bestseller C J Lyons, who gave away her novel Snake Skin for 24 hours back in 2011, achieving 35,000 downloads with the offer, before putting the price tag back on.

However, in a recent interview with Publishers Weekly, she states that it might not work today, citing that “the market is oversaturated with free books” before adding that “it is not uncommon for the free e-books blogs to post over 100 new free books a day.”

The majority of self-publishing authors – and the experts who have used giveaways for their own novels, including the likes of Jane Friedman, Mark Coker and Joanna Penn (read their thoughts on the same article as C.J Lyons was quoted from) – know that giveaways are the perfect marketing tool if there is something else that the reader can buy to continue the affiliation.

With that in mind, it makes sense to use giveaways when you have more than one book available, or are about to publish the second. Alternatively – and arguably more lucratively – it is a good idea to giveaway the first novel in a series of books you have on the market. This is likely to lead to the reader purchasing parts two and three in the series (or more if you have them) and could therefore become an incredible sales generator for your novels.

You can never write any marketing tool off in the self-publishing game, and whilst there are risks attached to giveaways, it certainly is not throwing money away. You just have to know when to optimise it to its full earning potential, which according to the experts, is when you have more than one book on the market.

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