Back in 2016, when Barrier Island Suite came out, I did a giveaway on Goodreads with a fair amount of success. Looking back, I gave away five copies and had nearly 500 people sign up to get one. The cost to me was the cost of five copies plus postage. I was okay with that. Did this actually result in sales? I have no way of knowing, but it did get some attention.
This summer, when I went back to Goodreads to set up another give-away for Tree Fall with Birdsong, I was surprised to see that they are now charging a fee to set up a giveaway: $119 or $599 for a premium plan.
Now, you might say that $199 isn’t too much to pay for advertising, but it did give me pause. I’m not planning to make a lot from a poetry collection, and in addition to the fee, it would cost me to provide and mail the books. By my calculus, it wouldn’t be worth it. If I did want to give copies away, there would probably be another way to do it on social media, though in the end, I chose to expend my efforts on in-person and virtual events, as well as interviews on Southern Review of Books and Mississippi Arts Hour. These seemed like better platforms for spreading the word about my book, and I wouldn’t be paying money to a subsidiary of Amazon.
If I were trying to build interest in a blockbuster title, my calculus might have been different. I can even see paying for the premium plan if it were part of a marketing campaign and if my publisher were behind it and willing to give out more copies than I could afford. If this led to more reviews and a greater presence on Goodreads, it might be worth it, especially if my book was the kind of book people care about there. I would want to know that there was an active community of readers who I could reach wiht my investment.
On a related note, I’ve been checking out a couple of other book social media sites, though so far they haven’t impressed me very much. StoryGraph is one that looks promising, but when I search for poetry books, I don’t see very much. They categorize books as either Fiction or Nonfiction, and poetry is a genre under Nonfiction. They claim to be able to find other readers with common interests, but so far, no one comes up for me, and they don’t give me any book recommendations. I suspect that’s because they haven’t figured out poetry yet.
Similarly, I had trouble finding books I’m reading on Page Bound, though it was easy to add them. All I had to do was go to Goodreads and copy the link to the book there, which seemed a little odd since Page Bound is billed as a Goodreads alternative.
I didn’t find a giveaway feature on Page Bond. On StoryGraph, there is one, but I couldn’t see how to sign up as an author or register to do one. I wasn’t too disappointed by that fact, since neither site seems to be all that interested in poets and I susspect that their reader base is more attuned to fiction.
Kendall Dunkelberg 