For those of you interested in ebook marketing, I thought you might like hearing about my little experiment in my recent ebook giveaway program on goodreads. Traditionally, they've only allowed giveaways of print books, which you can do for free, but you're required to pay your own shipping charges.
They have a new option, where you pay THEM to conduct the giveaway, which is limited to ONLY the U.S. and ONLY available for Amazon ebooks, but you can give away 100 ebooks, which THEY distribute for you.
Normally, I have anywhere from 700 to 1,100 people bidding for a scant 6 or 8 print books, my ebook giveaway, by comparison, only netted 223, and only then because I couldn't get close to 100 and asked my SOL readers to join the contest. So, in that regard, the contest was a colossal failure. It was, as it always has been, also a huge failure in that NO ONE ever writes an actual review of the books, what the site once touted as the main goal of the program.
The main benefit, is that every time I ran the old contests, I'd get around 700 people actually viewing my site to see who I was, so it's a great way of exposing yourself to readers (granted, most of those were my existing readers, but still).
Now, less than a month later, I can report the follow-up on the experiment. After giving away 100 books (with the assumption that those people will NEVER purchase the books they got for free), I've since sold 28 books (on Amazon), only 8 of which were for the book I gave away. What that means is that it was successful in attracting new readers, several of whom ordered much of my catalogue of 15 other books.
Thus, in one sense it was a failure, while in the other it was a success. Given the cost of the contest, and the potential 'lost sales' from giving away that many books, I'm not sure whether I'll try it again, especially since it's limited to the U.S. only, but it did what I wanted it to, which is to introduce me to new readers.
Of course, this news only impacts a couple of authors on SOL, so most likely couldn't care less, but ... just in case anyone else might be considering it.
