Regarding Giveaways

/ Shane

So, it’s not Sunday anymore (or even Monday when you get right down to it) so it’s time to announce the winner of the double giveaway!

The winner of the custom headband from ThreadAbell is Anna, which just goes to show you, enter early! Random number generators take notice on that sort of thing.

The winner of the copy of OOMPH: A Little Super Goes a Long Way is none other than my mom! This is not surprising, because my mom was the *only* entry for the book giveaway.

(As a reminder, OOMPH is available in paperback, as well as for the Kindle or Nook. If you’ve already read the book, please leave a review on Amazon!)

I’ve never really had a giveaway here on the blog, so this was a bit of a learning experience. Twitter is the social network in which I interact with the most writers, so I was thrilled to see the link retweeted and retweeted again, by people with *many* more followers than me. I was sure the response was going to be huge, but none of the people who saw that link ultimately registered for the giveaway.

Some of it just might be the nature of the beast. The blog didn’t register a significant amount more traffic than normal that day, which means most people didn’t click on the link at all. I should say that going into it, I didn’t expect a lot of interest. I know a lot of writers who try to give away books that are pretty unsuccessful (if any of you out there are interested in getting free books, you could seriously make a killing entering these drawings).

However, I think at least some of it was that perhaps it was a little too complicated (read this, go there, do that, come back here, etc.). Lots of text. I think that would be my big takeaway: if I ever did another giveaway, I would try to make it as simple as possible. I don’t know how to solve the apathy problem (people not clicking on the link), but if they do click over, I can perhaps at least solve the second part of it.

Oh well, it was interesting at least, I’m glad I tried it. Anybody have any thoughts on the matter? Do you like the giveaways? Is there a reason you entered/didn’t enter? Did anybody even read this far?

Is this thing on?

7 thoughts on “Regarding Giveaways”

  1. I really wanted the book and I had been meaning to buy one but hadn’t yet. I don’t remember it being very complicated but I was really determined!

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  2. I’ve done giveaways on my blog before, the response has been low, around 20 people. And that was just with a leave a comment.

    On the plus side, I have won quite a lot of stuff through entering these competitions!

    I hear that the best way to do it is through Goodreads.

    Interesting about twitter not leading to an increase in hits.

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    • The Crossed Genres twitter sent it out as well as both editors and some of my co-authors. It was over 10k followers between them, people who specifically like the kinds of books they publish, and it wasn’t even my most-trafficked post of the week! (I understand some of those people are overlap, but still)

      Oh well, live and learn. 🙂

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      • *nods* I’ve found that with twitter too. When a tweet gets RT’d you might expect a few hits from it. But not so much. Maybe it’s not a very good marketing tool.

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