Publishing Timeline: Giveaway Scheduling

A Basic Framework for Timing Your Goodreads and/or Storygraph Giveaways

It’s always fun to focus on the wow-factor elements of a book campaign, but what about the more functional, less exciting items on the marketing and publicity plan? For a well-rounded campaign, it’s important to have such items in the mix. A really good example of this is the ol’ Goodreads Giveaway.

In fact, I think a Goodreads giveaway is a part of almost every book campaign, whether it’s from a big 5 publisher, a small indie, or self-published by the author.

Part of the reason for this is because it’s very easy to gear one up (and fulfill), and it’s cheap. A standard Goodreads giveaway costs $119, and it can take less than ten minutes to set up. For marketing departments and authors, it’s important to have programmatic levers you can easily and efficiently pull in every campaign that are not going to drain time and budget.

But a Goodreads giveaways does serve a campaign well, as it can help with general awareness and encourage people to follow you on the platform; get your book added to Goodreads’ users’ “To Read” lists and cycled into a notification when your book goes on sale (happens when they enter the giveaway); and can deliver pre-pub galleys and publication day finished copies of your book to readers outside your network — all of which is helpful with early buzz and word-of-mouth. A decent percentage of people who win a of copy of your book through a Goodreads giveaway will post a review. And people who post reviews on Goodreads tend to also publish their reviews on other platforms, whether it’s on their own website or on retailer sites like Amazon. This is important — you want your book product pages to be active and feature as many reviews as possible. The more reviews and ratings you see on a Goodreads book page or an Amazon product page, the better that book is performing.

In terms of the Publishing Timeline, this is a baseline recommendation on when to do a Goodreads giveaway: