Daniel Ionson's Blog - Posts Tagged "indie"
Indie-Authors, etc. & GR Giveaways
For other Indie-authors out here...
I have concluded that the GR giveaways are mostly a waste of $/effort. It seems that a strong majority of the time the people entering these contests just want to "win" without any intention of reading, let alone reviewing, your work. I haven't spent the time to compile all of my stats, but a skim of my GR Giveaways shows that roughly 20-30% of those books given away were marked as read, and even fewer gave reviews. EG: 5+ weeks ago, I gave away 10 copies of my TMYF book. 0 have begun it, and only 4 have it even as "to read". Yes, perhaps 5 weeks isn't long enough, but this is typical of the results of all of my GR Giveaways.
I can only guess at why people sign up to win a book they're not interested in. Do they believe they can sell it somewhere? They probably can't; I'm an unknown author. Do they just need kindling?
Those who have accepted copies of my books and left reviews/ratings have been those that I reached out to personally (either through GR or via their blogs, etc.). But GR has restricted that now, so...
No one gets to know the truth about how the GR staff pics their winners (and yes, they do pick the winners-- it is not random). But if human discernment is being used, why aren't the GR staffers picking people with a track-record of reading/rating/reviewing? It's pretty damned easy to differentiate between the two types of winners based on their existing ratings. Again, we never get an answer to this question.
I know this issue has been discussed by others, and in more depth. I'm just adding my own input.
I have concluded that the GR giveaways are mostly a waste of $/effort. It seems that a strong majority of the time the people entering these contests just want to "win" without any intention of reading, let alone reviewing, your work. I haven't spent the time to compile all of my stats, but a skim of my GR Giveaways shows that roughly 20-30% of those books given away were marked as read, and even fewer gave reviews. EG: 5+ weeks ago, I gave away 10 copies of my TMYF book. 0 have begun it, and only 4 have it even as "to read". Yes, perhaps 5 weeks isn't long enough, but this is typical of the results of all of my GR Giveaways.
I can only guess at why people sign up to win a book they're not interested in. Do they believe they can sell it somewhere? They probably can't; I'm an unknown author. Do they just need kindling?
Those who have accepted copies of my books and left reviews/ratings have been those that I reached out to personally (either through GR or via their blogs, etc.). But GR has restricted that now, so...
No one gets to know the truth about how the GR staff pics their winners (and yes, they do pick the winners-- it is not random). But if human discernment is being used, why aren't the GR staffers picking people with a track-record of reading/rating/reviewing? It's pretty damned easy to differentiate between the two types of winners based on their existing ratings. Again, we never get an answer to this question.
I know this issue has been discussed by others, and in more depth. I'm just adding my own input.
