My series of 4 weekly giveaways has come to an end. Here is my report on how (good) they went and some reasons why you should host a giveaway as an author (and join it as a reader).

If you’ve been in the self publishing industry for a while you know that some months can be very tough sales wise. If November and December have been really epic, January and February are always pretty quiet for me, so I figured it would be a good time to run some giveaways.

Since I have four ebooks on the market I thought of giving away some e-copies of each book, hosting one giveaway per week.

Here are the steps I made to plan 4 giveaways in advance:

– Wrote the copy for each event plus a general “announcement” post on this blog and four different posts (one per giveaway) on my author website
– Created some graphics using Photoshop
– Scheduled the blog posts and put reminders on my Google Calendar
– Created the giveaway list on MailChimp as well as a specific landing page for the giveaway
– Contacted some blogger and fellow authors asking if they could allocate some space on their blogs for advertising the giveaways
– Sorted out an email with everything the bloggers might need for crafting four different blog posts about my giveaways (the email looked like a press kit)
– Spread the voice on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Pinterest on a daily basis
– Every Sunday, launched a random software to find the winners, then emailed them privately
– Kept my Facebook and Twitter followers posted about winners and the launch of a new giveaway

My giveaways have been a success for the following 6 simple reasons:

1. Nearly 1000 people joined them, meaning nearly 1000 potential new interested readers for Mr Williams
2. Sales went up on Amazon
3. The voice of a Vol.3 of the Cutting Right to the Chase detective short stories collection started to be spread around, meaning free buzzing on my new release
4. I gained a bunch of new (positive) reviews – thank you so much, readers!
5. My Facebook page‘s likes increased between 2.8% and 6.3% every week
6. @EraniaPinnera had 286 more followers gained organically, @ChaseWilliams78 163

Now that Amazon has launched its own giveaway program, it may be a bit tougher for authors to host their own giveaways separated from Amazon (or Goodreads, which established its giveaway structure a while ago). It’s not impossible, though, also considering that:
– Some authors have their own books hosted in other platforms apart from Amazon (Smashwords, Google Books, iTunes to name some)
– Amazon and Goodreads giveaways are for paperbacks only (and people love reading on e-readers as well)

Given my brilliant experience with my weekly giveaways, if you’re an author I would highly recommend to run a giveaway you too, every now and then. What you give for free comes always back with a double value. If you’re a reader, take advantage of the generosity of the authors and give it a try. If you win, you have a book for free. If you don’t win, you might have just met a potential new world of fiction to discover.