We generally focus on evergreen marketing principles on this show rather than current news. There are great podcasts that cover new industry news, like the Sell More Books Show. But Goodreads just made a change so important that I feel like we have to cover it, and that's Goodreads giveaways.
Background
Back in episodes 12 and 14, we talked about how to use Goodreads to market your book. We had Randy Ingermanson on, and one of the techniques we discussed was giving away your book for free.
Randy ran some experiments, and we found that giving away just one book, over and over again, was quite effective. It wasn't free. You had to send a physical book to each contest winner, which cost $5 to $10 per book depending on printing and shipping. Giving away 10 books ran $50 to $100. But giving away just one book at a time, which we found was the best bang for the buck, cost only $10 to host a giveaway. It was a great deal if you were marketing your book on a budget.
The Problem
The technique worked so well that everyone started doing it, and word spread well beyond this podcast. The giveaway section got so crowded that when I checked yesterday, there were 3,000 different titles listed, which is too many for readers to browse. The result is that giveaways aren't as effective as they used to be.
What's Changing
Goodreads is changing giveaways in a pretty fundamental way. First, indie authors on KDP will be able to give away ebooks for the first time. Traditional publishers already had this option, which caused a lot of complaints about fairness. Goodreads had held off on ebooks for indies to keep its system from being flooded and books from getting lost in the noise.
Now indies can give away ebooks too, but there's a catch. Hosting a contest is no longer free. It will cost $119 for a basic contest and $599 for the premium package.
Goodreads is also making giveaways more powerful. Everyone who enters will have the book automatically added to their “want to read” list, which triggers an update in their friends' feeds. This used to be optional. Now it's required for anyone entering a contest.
Authors' followers, and anyone who's already added the book to their “want to read” list, will get a notification when a new giveaway starts. That generates more entries and more activity in the Goodreads update feed, which can create an escalating amount of promotion. Say 200 people add your book to their want-to-read list during one giveaway. Run a second giveaway later, and all 200 of them get notified to enter, snowballing your attention. At least that's the theory. We'll see if it plays out.
Eight weeks after a giveaway ends, winners will get an email from Goodreads reminding them to rate and review the book. I believe Goodreads already does this, but it will have a much bigger impact when you've just given away 100 ebooks instead of one print copy. That makes giveaways a real tool for building reviews, something that spending $5 to $10 to mail one free book was never particularly good at. Spend $119 to give away 100 ebooks, and you'll likely get 10 or 20 reviews out of it, maybe more. We won't know the real numbers until the new system is live and people start using it.
The $599 premium package puts you on the Goodreads home page, which the company says gets millions of visitors. You'd be sharing that space with everyone else who buys the premium tier. I have no idea yet if it's worth it. We'll see.
What This Means for Authors
Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly. A lot of the reaction I've seen has been negative, along the lines of “I can't believe they're charging for this.” But it was never free. It always cost money to ship a book to someone.
The good: giving away 100 ebooks for $119 can actually save you money compared to giving away 100 paper books, which runs $500 to $1,000. A hundred books is the max Goodreads allows per giveaway.
Giveaways will also create more noise and more notifications for readers, which makes them more powerful. Right now, only the truly passionate readers dig through the giveaways section of the site. Under the new system, giveaways will show up directly in people's notifications instead.
If I see that a bunch of my friends have added your book to their want-to-read list, that makes me want to read it too. It's also going to make for a less crowded market. Everyone who refuses to pay drops out, which means the same pool of readers is spread across far fewer books. This could end up being the next BookBub in terms of effectiveness, at a fraction of BookBub's $300 to $600 price tag, though we won't know until it's live.
You can also think of a 100-ebook giveaway as a kind of permafree. The trouble with making a book free on Amazon is that people add it to their Kindle and never get around to reading it. Winning a contest makes a book feel more valuable, which makes people more likely to read it and review it. That matters, because it's hard to leave a negative review for a book you got for free.
The bad: it's going to cost more, full stop. Giving away just one book no longer makes financial sense. If you're going to spend $119, you might as well give away 10 books instead of one, and get ten times the reviews.
The ugly: Goodreads gave authors very little notice. The change takes effect January 9, 2018. Until then, you can still run a free giveaway under the old system.
My Recommendation
Enter the haystack with the other 3,000 authors while it's still free. It'll only cost you $5 to $10 in shipping, and you don't need to sell many extra copies to make that worth it, even if you're traditionally published and selling through your advance.
On that note, marketing is harder for traditionally published authors since you don't have the budget or the data indie authors have. Based on our survey, about 80% of you want us to talk less about traditional publishing and more about indie publishing, so that's the direction we're heading.
Goodreads Marketing Techniques That Are Still Free
Goodreads remains one of the few social networks worth an author's time, largely because most of what you do there is a one-time setup rather than an ongoing commitment. Start by joining the Goodreads Author Program. It's free, takes about an hour, and gets you a verified badge on all your books.
Next, connect your blog to Goodreads. Once a week, Goodreads emails all of a blog's followers with recent posts. For some authors, that's the only way I hear from them since they don't have newsletters. Once you've connected your blog, you never have to touch it again.
Claim your profile, which is also part of the Author Program. It lets you interact with readers, though be careful: you won't talk anyone into raising a one-star rating. Let people vent, and focus your energy on the positive reviews.
Add your book to Listopia lists. I use Listopia often, both to list books I've read and to discover new ones. I keep a list of the best business books about failure, since I think success is a poor teacher and failure teaches lessons nothing else can. When another reader adds a book to that list, I often check it out myself. That's how I found an audiobook about the Yugo, whose factory was bombed by the American military during a war in the 1990s, which is part of why you can't buy one anymore. Add your own book to relevant lists, but don't spam Listopia. That's neither good marketing nor good etiquette.
You can also start or join a Q&A discussion group about your book. That's still free too.
Don't panic about the changes. Goodreads is charging for one specific feature, and my hope is that the revenue goes back into making the platform better. Goodreads is the worst social network for authors, except for all the others. I want Goodreads to get even better, and this may give them the means to do it.
Finally, connect Goodreads to your author site through MyBookTable. It lets visitors add your book to their Goodreads want-to-read list with one click, which pairs nicely with the new giveaway notifications. It also lets you embed your real Goodreads reviews, good and bad, right on your book pages. Readers trust reviews pulled straight from Goodreads more than ones you've copied and pasted yourself, since they assume you cherry-picked those.
Books with a few 1-star reviews actually outsell books with none. A run of fifty 5-star reviews and nothing else reads as suspicious, like the whole list came from a launch team. A few 1-star reviews mixed in make the good reviews more credible, and the data backs this up, the same way Amazon discovered decades ago that showing reviews at all helps sales. The exception is if your average rating drops to two and a half or three stars, which does hurt you. I remember being genuinely excited when my own book got its first 1-star review. It meant people were finally taking me seriously.
Take advantage of the last window to run a free giveaway, and if you try the new paid system, let us know how it goes. We may even cover it in a future episode.
