Reader Offer/Giveaway

What are offers and giveaways?

Offers and giveaways are offering copies of your book at a reduced price, or as a prize in a competition.

For example:

• Some magazines might want to give away a free copy of your book.
• In genre fiction reduced price ebooks can offer a publicity boost.
• If you hold an event you can offer reduced priced books as a benefit of attending.

I want a price drop promotion

We believe that it's much better to sell at RRP and that a price promotion is not a sales panacea!

Authors dropping the price of their book, without putting effort into a dedicated marketing plan, tend to receive a few dozen sales (if that).

We only like to even think about such promotions after 1000 sales and 50+ Amazon reviews, and the minimum sales target should be hundreds of books. And even if your book has achieved the above, the promotion is still at the Publisher's discretion.

If you want us to create a price-drop promotion, be confident that your book and your marketing work is of the quality needed to make it work.

Drop us a line on the Reader Offer/Giveaway – ebook promotions forum with:

• Details on how you plan to market the price drop promotion.
• An estimate of the number of people you hope to reach.
• The two-week window in which the offer would be in effect with your price drop promotion request.

Out of all the online marketing services we tend to get the best results with BookBub, but they won't look at a book unless sales and Amazon reviews are high enough.

We have valuable information to assist authors in creating a robust, dedicated and thorough marketing plan in our Marketing 365 for ideas, tips and advice.

Please note that we need to be confident that any author will heavily market the price drop promotion before agreeing to it.

I want to have an offer/giveaway. What should I do?

You can use your review copies for giveaways. If you want to arrange a copy as a prize, drop us a line on the Review Copies Author Forum.

For inspiration, here are a couple of ideas from Marketing 365. For more inspiration, read the full chapter.

• Hold a monthly/weekly online event and invite your following, media contacts, influencers, endorsers, other authors and key people relevant to your books. It could be a mixture of a book reading, Q&A, discussing topics relevant to your book and a giveaway as a thank you to one lucky attendee.
• Offer media companies a signed copy of your book as a giveaway promotion. This could be a superb way to generate interest.

How to organize a discount

Our US and UK distributors can offer your attendees your book(s) at a discount (20% is normal) to readers. This is known as a “discount code”. It can last for a specified amount of time, particularly if you are doing several talks/events/conferences. Typically, we have organized codes to run for 6 months. Promotions must be set up by JHP. If you would like to run a promotion, please post your request in the the Help forum under Sales & Distribution/Other queries. And make sure to add this promotion to your Marketing Activities and to share with JHP on the FB closed author group. Read Chapter 16: Ordering, for more info.

Record your offers/giveaways as Marketing Activities

• Enter any giveaway you do as a Marketing Activity
• Let us know on the Marketing and Publicity/Reader Offer forum, so we can highlight the offer on our social media.

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